Arranged by month, this volume takes you through a year of Elizabethan cooking. Oh, so you thought the French invented meringues? This book will not only provide you with many delicious recipes, but also challenge your preconceptions about 16th century food. The book is so intriguing, you'll want to try receipes right away.

I went out of my way to track down a copy of "PAUL SCOTT: A Life of the Author of the Raj Quartet" by Hilary Spurling because I have just completed reading the four books Scott called "The Raj Quartet": JEWEL IN THE CROWN, DAY OF THE SCORPIAN, TOWERS OF SILENCE, DIVISION OF THE SPOILS. I have also recently purchased the fabulous BBC production available on DVD and I recommend it. Spurling has written an exquisite biography and I found she answered many answers I had about THE masterpiece of the 20th Century (including what happened to some of the key characters).

Scott was born in 1920 when England ruled 1/4 of the globe. When WWII broke out, and he was in his early twenties, England conscripted him and sent him to fight the Japanese. He served three years in Southeast Asia, much of that time in India. He returned home after the war and began a writing career that did not florish. As he had an accountant's training, he became a writer's agent--handing the financial arrangements of many authors including Murial Spark who wrote THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE and M.M. Kaye who wrote THE FAR PAVILLIONS (long after he wrote his first book in the Raj Quartet).

Scott continued to write in the evenings, but after several mediocre novels, he realized he would never be a first class author unless he took the giant step and quit his job and began writing full time. His novels during this second phase of his career were modestly successful, enough to pay the rent, but not enough to keep the wolf completely away from the door. After writing several less-then-successful books set in India, he decided he needed to travel to India again.

He wasn't sure what he would find on his second trip, but once in India he met many individuals, English and Indian, who shared stories of their lives during the last days of the Raj. Inspired by these stories, he returned to England and began to compose the four novels that became the Raj Quartet.

Spurling's description of Scott's creative process--how the frustrations of his life, his perseverance in the belief he was supposed to write even after nine failed novels, and his of love of India finally coalesced into a masterpiece--is well-written. I recommend it to anyone who aspires to write.

The first book JEWEL IN THE CROWN was published in the mid-60s and set off a storm of controversy. Many of the English were not ready to "visit" the reality of their colonial past. The loss of India was not unlike the "permanently open, stinking, supporating, unhealed wound" of Philoctetes, the Greek archer who killed Paris in the taking of Troy--whose name became Hari Kumar's pseudonym. Scott died in 1978 before the Raj Quartet became an international hit. In the early 1980s the BBC dramatized the stories and the rest is history.

This is a fine book. Spurling does not pull any punches and she's done her homework. She used letters, diaries, jounals, personal interviews and many historical documents to compile an excellent story. She apparently admired her subject, but she seems to have written about him honestly. It may surprise anyone familiar with these stories to know that Scott acknowledged he could be found in all his characters, and like Wilde's Dorian Grey who had a public and a hidden side, Scott was a divided man who discoverd he was both Hari Kumar and Ronald Merrick.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) came from the somber northern region of France. The landscape of his youth was sketched in the somber colors of a provinical childhood. His family were seed merchants, sober and no nonsense in their approach to the realities of life. As Matisse grew his art expanded as he journeyed to Paris and to the South of France where he discovered the glories of coloration in his art. Matisse was the greatest of the Fauvist painters; the chief rival of Picasso and the grand old man of French painting.
In this first volume of her life of Matisse, Hilary Spurling the British born biographer draws France in the dawn of the 20th
century as we see Matisse struggle from poverty to stability. He was supported by a loving wife, good friends and a genius which
burst forth in all its glory as the great master continue to grow in his art.
The book is well illustrated, detailed in its description of Matisse's families, friends and opponents and well worth the reader's time.
With the current exhibition of Matisse-Picasso at the Metropolitan Museum of Mordern Art it is a pleasure to turn to Spurling's fine volume on Matisse to gain further insights into this giant of modern art. I recommend this book to everyone from art expert to the educated general reader seeking further insights into the evolution of a painter of genius.

This is a genuinely inspiring biography, clearly written and deeply felt, powerfully communicating the revolutionary ideas of what painting could and should be that drove, and were driven by, Henri Matisse. Spurling vividly describes Matisse's struggles to balance his need to paint with financial reality and his society's disdain, often using the artist's own letters and recollections to depict his growing obsession with color and impatience with representation.

Although I eagerly await the second volume, the true measure of Spurling's success is my anticipation in revisiting Matisse's paintings -- my enjoyment of his work has been increased immeasurably by reading this book.

I read this book last year and have been anxiously awaiting the next volume. A marvelous examination of Matisse's start, the development of his passion for art and the complex personal life that made the journey extraordinary and, at the same time, ordinary. The images of his parents, their scandalous employers, his wife, his children, and his remarkable artistic peers remain very vivid for me, as each are really intriguing in and of themselves. Spurling is enormously engaging as a writer, and this book takes you to France at the turn of the 20th century and present time and place in a way that stays with the reader. It's a fantastic work.

The book doesn't take long to read, but I found it inadequate to tell what is an intriguing story. Its chronolgy leaves something to be desired, and I at least would have appreciated more footnotes, more explanation of the importance of the historical figures who are involved in the swindle, and a more documentary-like account. In my (1958) edition of the Encyclopedia American there is a one-paragraph account of The Humbert Swindle, but in my (1940) edition of the Brittanica I find no mention of the affair. Is this because it involved people who were Dreyfusards rather than anti-Dresfusards? I really think this swindle deserves a better book, tho I suppose Hilary Spurling will say that she has told us all she could find on it. But in view of the extensive press coverage I find that hard to believe.

Who was Thérèse Humbert? She was part Heidi Fleiss, part Frank Abagnale, part Don Juan, part politician, part Nelson Rockefeller, part Jackie O, part social Niccolo Machiavelli and part dumb lucky.

The tale of Thérèse Humbert's ability to build a career of fame and fortune out of completely nothing is better than Spurling's ability to tell it. A better writer would taken this intriguing story and made it into a great book.

To credit Spurling, she did her research well, but she writes with the method of a common feature journalist. The story is strong enough and compelling enough to keep any reader interested.

The story, in the end of it all, is a historic tragedy -- a sad docudrama put to print. Quickly read, it totals roughly 150 pages with ample leading and margins.

Anthony Trendl

I am interested in the Third Republic period of France, and this book detailed another scandal from that period. The book details the life of Therese Daurignac who married a son of the founder of the Republic. It details how Humbert, his son Theodore, and his wife committed a fraud on the French nation by pretending to be rich when in fact they were peasants with no money. Eventually, their scheme of borrowing money to pay other creditors collasped, and Therese and her husband were sent to prison.
If there is a criticism of this book, it is the brevity of it. 132 pages cannot bring to life how thousands of people were cheated out of their money, so that Therese could live the good life. For other books about scandals in the Third Republic, read Prisoners of Honor, The Dreyfus Affair by David Levering Lewis and The Panama Affair by Maron J. Simon.