The Singing Swan: An Account of Anna Seward and Her Acquaintance with Doctor Johnson, Boswell and Others of Their Time Book

Frances Harris has written the definitive work on the friendship between John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin. No doubt many relationships such as these existed, but Evelyn's prominence as a Restoration diarist and general Renaissance-man and the surprising survival of his private hagiography of Margaret provides us with a window into a world of relationships almost utterly unlike our own. It's a view that is both poignant and frustrating.

Harris is intelligent, humane, and elegant in her treatment of the characters and their story. I'm also keenly appreciative of her refusal to trivialise the all-pervading (Anglo-Catholic) Christianity of their world. She is a historian par excellence.

Since reading this 2 years ago, I've become much more of a Roundhead, so it really grieves me now to remember Evelyn's gloating over the severed heads of the regicides after the Restoration. I'd recommend "The Tyrrancide Brief" for anyone who still has any fond sentiments for Charles I, or stereotypes of angry Puritans dispatching him.