Cavalier: Lucy Worsley

[poliphilo]

William Cavendish was a Civil War General (gallant but incompetent), a poet and playwright (not very good), an amateur architect (partly responsible for the delectable Bolsover Castle in Nottinghamshire), a playboy ( a great pouncer on housemaids), an ur-feminist (married and devoted to the extraordinarily eccentric Margaret- author of the first SF novel in the English language) and a horseman (the world authority on what we now call dressage, who, had he been around today, would have been weighed down with Olympic gold). It was a big life- and Worsley uses it as the peg- or series of pegs- on which to hang an entertaining social history- which tells you all you could possibly want to know about what 17th century people of all classes ate, wore, smelled like and all that kind of thing.