Oh, you clever people!
Tom Crewe: The Unrelenting Bensons, 20 April 2017
A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain
by Simon Goldhill.
Chicago, 337 pp., £24.50, October 2016,978 0 226 39378 0 Show More
by Simon Goldhill.
Chicago, 337 pp., £24.50, October 2016,
“... Arthur Benson never stopped dreaming about his father. Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, dropped dead saying the Confession in 1896 – he sank onto his prayer cushion and didn’t get up again – but nearly twenty years later his son found him crouched in the cupboard under the stairs, dressed in his purple cassock and playing with some toys: ‘Papa … giggled; then he said: “But now that you have found me out, you must run down here as often as you can, and we will have a good game at something – You don’t know what fun it is ... ”