Splendour & Squalor: Marcus Scriven

Reviews, articles, comment

Splendour & Squalor

  • “Witty, gossipy and profoundly researched”
    — Christopher Hart, Sunday Times
    Full review →

  • “Hilarious and riveting … beautifully written and compulsively readable, Splendour and Squalor is popular history at its best”
    — Max Dunbar, 3AM Magazine
    Full review →

  • “Scriven avoids being judgmental. He treads a fine line between elegy and disapproval. By pitching his tone right, and providing plenty of juicy details, he has produced a work of wide appeal”
    — Oliver Marre, Observer
    Full review →

  • “Scriven guides us through each catalogue of errors with relish and wit”
    — Christopher Silvester, Daily Telegraph
    Full review →

  • “Compelling…so riveting that it is hard to put down”
    — Edinburgh Evening News
    Full review →

  • “It is perhaps just as well that the hereditary principle has been eradicated from the House of Lords…Scriven has had huge fun telling these grisly tales”
    — Roger Lewis, Sunday Express,
    Top Reads & Winning Book Titles of 2009
    Full review →

  • “A rich pudding of a book, full of fruits and nuts…the author’s ornate, antique style, admirably suited to the subject”
    — Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
    Full review →

  • “Witty, compassionate, thorough, erudite and fascinating”
    — Steve Meacham, Sun-Herald (Australia)
    Full article →

  • “Wickedly entertaining”
    — Yorkshire Post
    full review
    [PDF file Yorkshire Post 05.12.09] →

  • “Compelling reading”
    — Christopher Gray, Oxford Times
    Full review →

  • “A guilty pleasure”
    — Saga

  • “A gossipy and intriguing social history”
    — The Times

  • “Fascinating”
    — East Anglian Daily Times
    full review
    [PDF file East Anglian Daily Times 05.12.09] →

  • “Compelling…written beautifully”
    — Jersey Life

  • “It’s fantastic: I was gripped – and appalled”
    — Selina Hastings, author of The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

  • “A masterpiece…Scriven is a superb writer”
    — Peter Oborne, Chief Political Commentator on the Daily Telegraph, author of The Triumph of The Political Class

  • “Utterly riveting and a total and lasting pleasure…a modern classic of group biography”
    — Valerie Grove, author of So Much To Tell

  • “An excellent book, tremendously enjoyable”
    — Dr Terence Dooley, senior Lecturer in History at the National University of Maynooth, author of The Decline of The Big House in Ireland

With thanks to www.thepeerage.com

© 2024 Marcus Scriven