Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts

Thursday, 20 August 2026

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.

Sunday, 5 October 2025

BOOK REVIEW-The Curious World of Samuel Pepys & John Evelyn by Margaret Willes


Margaret Willes’ book provided my first introduction to the life of John Evelyn, weaving aspects of his life alongside that of his friend and (the now arguably more famous) Pepys. The title is a nod to the ‘insatiable curiosity’ that the author states they both shared.

Sermon-I Look Up to Him. I Look Down on Him.

  Contempt of Hatred (Expressive Head), by Ernest Joseph Bailley, c1792 (Museum of Fine Arts Ghent) A sermon given during Holy Communion at ...