Critics were fascinated by Elizabeth Foyster’s The Trials of the King of Hampshire: Madness, Secrecy and Betrayal in Georgian England. According to DJ Taylor in the Times, it is a “penetrating” biography of John Charles Wallop, and “a thoroughly absorbing study, heading beyond the immediate confines of its subject to considerations of pre-Victorian attitudes to insanity”. In the Daily Mail, Roger Lewis’s sympathies were torn. “One moment the reader has intense sympathy for poor old John Charles Wallop, the third Earl of Portsmouth, who in 1823 ... was the subject of a Commission of Lunacy, a grim legal proceeding to establish whether he was of unsound mind. The next moment, evidence is produced about ... his fondness for whipping his horses mercilessly, and you’d happily lock Portsmouth up and throw the key in a pond.” In the Literary Review, Miranda Seymour praised Foyster as “a scrupulous and thorough historian [and] also a delightfully inquisitive one”, who makes Wallop’s story “as compelling as a Wilkie Collins novel”, while in the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton admired her restraint: “With the best liberal etiquette, she refuses to judge whether her protagonist was genuinely mad.” He called it an “assiduously researched, crisply written biography”.
Nell Zink’s Nicotine is thoroughly modern and very funny, but “not a neat novel”, according to Stephanie Cross in the Daily Mail. “Plot and perspective pinball gleefully – but it’s weirdly affecting, totally addictive and exhilaratingly unlike anything else you’ll read.” Its characters, she said, include “unemployed business graduate Penny, the daughter of a South American mother and Jewish Shamanist father ... Penny’s sociopathic half-brother Matt ... and the smokers’-rights-defending inhabitants of [a] New Jersey squat”. Duncan White in the Daily Telegraph also found “something addictive about her taut, ironic prose – Nicotine is a fitting title. Her sentences are like cigarettes: the first few are dizzying and not always pleasant, but before you know it, you’re hooked”. The Independent’s Lucy Scholes agreed, finding it “slightly less frenzied but still pretty manic by the standards of most narratives, Nicotine proves Zink’s distinctive verve as mesmerising as ever.”
Reviewers were largely in agreement about Margaret Atwood’s novel Hag-Seed, a reworking of Shakespeare’s The Tempest set in a prison theatre, which was declared “a triumph ... winningly inventive and often very funny” (Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times) and “an unqualified success” (John Harding in the Daily Mail). Harding was one of several who remarked that Atwood seems to have “fun” with the material – or, in the words of the Sunday Express’s Eithne Farry, “throws a handful of theatrical glittery confetti over” Shakespeare’s play. The Mail on Sunday’s Hephzibah Anderson was impressed by how “Atwood exerts a sorceress’s sway over its themes of art and treachery, resulting in a slyly inventive, intricately constructed homage with plenty of its own points to make”. The Times’s Jonathan Bate, while urging readers to try to see the play before reading the book, declared it “surpassingly brilliant … without question the cleverest ‘neo-Shakespearean novel’ I have read … Students will learn more about the deeper meanings of The Tempest from this singular novel than from dozens of academic studies.”
