BOOK REVIEW- Lady Fanshawe’s Receipt Book: The Life and Times of a Civil War Heroine by Lucy Moore

It is a nice change to reada book about the record of a life of a woman connected to the church. Ann Fanshawe left a memoir and a ‘receipt book’ - not a record of things she has bought but a sort of recipe book, containing details of medicines as well as food and other tips on household management.

Ann was born in the parish of St Olave Hart Street in 1625 and spent her earliest years here. Her father, John Harrison, came from a modest background to occupy an important official position which involved engaging with the merchants, display rooms and warehouses that surrounded the church for most of its modern history and would have been well known in the parish.

In this book, Lucy Moore cross references both Ann’s memoir and her receipt book to tell the story of a woman raising a royalist family through the Civil War from exile to the Restoration.

BOOK REVIEW- Golden Lads: A Study of Anthony Bacon, Francis and their Friends by Daphne du Maurier

Daphne Du Maurier’s account of the lives of Anthony and Francis Bacon ends with a description of her visit to St Olave Hart Street in October 1973.

Like a passage from her novels and short stories it offers a romantic scene in which an organist suddenly starts to play the Tudor melody Greensleeves as she ponders the life of Anthony, whose burial at St Olave’s she had rediscovered in the parish records but whose final years are shrouded in mystery. Most of this book focuses on Anthony - the lesser known of the two brothers.

BOOK REVIEW-Barabus by S.J. Fowler

So far a unique way for me to discover a book - from a link in the footer of an email sent to me by the author; the title caught my eye. Unlike the novel with a similar name by Pär Lagerkvist, this isn’t a story about the man who was expecting to be crucified until Jesus took his place on the cross. But both seem to offer rich points of reflection on matters central to our faith.

The life-saver in this novel is an unnamed paramedic. Such is the depth of the honest and sometimes uncomfortable detail, I wondered if the author had direct experience as a first responder?

BOOK REVIEW-More than Nine Lessons and Carols

Long time Head of History at the University of York and Lay Canon of the Minster, Allen Warren says he reluctantly accepted the task of writing the biography of the man best known for creating Nine Lessons and Carols with its now famous bidding prayer, first heard six weeks after the end of the First World War. The book documents his ministry at King's College, Cambridge and later at York Minster—an appointment, it is suggested, that was a result just as much of old school ties and circumstance as anything else—although one that Milner-White embraced as a "Civic Dean".

BOOK REVIEW-The Lost Diary of Samuel Pepys. A Novel

There must have been more than a few novels inspired by St Olave Hart Street and the area around it - and if not, there are plenty to be written! Jack Jewers opens his imaginary “post diary” life of Pepys with a veiled reference to one of the many legends associated with this place - the burial of Mother Goose here (who he calls Mother Quick in the novel) - said by some to have been the Madam of the Winchester Geese - streetworkers licensed by the Bishop of Winchester - who we glimpse in the novel, in a flash.