The Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon2011

Newport writer, Bernard Pearson, offers this review of The Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon

This scholarly and well-researched book could be as dry as an Egyptian tomb uncovered by one of its principals the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon had it not been for the author’s attention to detail and instinct for not backing away from controversy.

Here opening up before us the physical and emotional idiosyncrasies of our Victorian and Edwardian ‘betters’, the philanthropists, the litigants, the loveless unions, the skeletons half in and half out of the closet, the gamblers, the rakes and adulterers, all written with an authentic eye on the facts as far as they can be established glimpsed through the ever closing ranks of the British aristocracy

The author’s referencing to place and deft...