Bee Wilson

To read the Asquith-Venetia letters is to see that Asquith was a weird kind of philanderer. On the one hand, he has all the complacency of a powerful man, who – despite his general aura of Liberal pacifism – seems pretty thrilled to have so many tin soldiers to move around. Yet he also comes across as childishly needy, constantly asking her whether she found some speech he made clever or boring or whether she thinks he acted rightly on some point of national strategy. The Venetia he addresses is partly a daughter, partly a lover, and partly a projection of himself.

Lists​ make us feel better. They take the uncertainty and messiness of life and spray it with a sense of purpose. On low days, I sometimes write to-do lists of tasks I have already done and put ticks next to them, just to give myself the illusion of resolve. We cross days off a calendar, and imagine that July was something we positively achieved, rather than an unstoppable wave of time that...

Edith Piaf’s musical persona was highly, and brilliantly, constructed, however artless it was intended to seem. In private, she was amusing and loved practical jokes, but her act was devoid of irony. In her songs, she projected a stage mask of suffering, pain and deprivation which was all the more affecting because the audience knew that there was real suffering, pain and deprivation behind it. Her fans often remarked how ‘natural’ she was; how real. ‘With anyone else you have time to think that she’s singing well or badly. With Piaf, you undergo her,’ a critic wrote in 1950.

Alma Mahler Werfel celebrated her 70th birthday at home in Beverly Hills on the last day of August 1949. A brass band played as guests chose from a Mitteleuropean selection of drinks: champagne, black coffee or Alma’s favourite, Bénédictine (by the end of her life, she was drinking a bottle a day). In the dining room, an abundant buffet was laid out. Luminaries from the ‘German California’ scene came to pay homage to the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler and the writer Franz Werfel, Walter Gropius’s divorced wife and Oscar Kokoshka’s former lover.

In Holloway prison​, in March 1909, Constance Lytton decided to carve the words ‘Votes for Women’ across her chest. She had been locked up for taking part in suffragette protests but found that, as an aristocrat, she was receiving preferential treatment from the prison officers, and she didn’t like it. Lytton had serious establishment connections. She was the sister of a...