One Pair of Hands

Sep 21, 2024 12:57 PM

Author:Monica Dickens

One Pair of Hands

'Life was a wordless battle of wits between us, with her keeping a sharp look-out for signs of neglect, and me trying to disguise my slovenliness by subterfuge. I became an adept at sweeping dust under the bed, and always used the same few pieces of silver'

Unimpressed by the world of debutante balls, Monica Dickens shocked her family by getting a job. With no experience whatsoever, she gained employment as a cook-general.

Monica's cooking and cleaning skills left much to be desired, and her first few positions were short lived, but soon she started to hold her own. Monica discovered the pleasure of daily banter with the milkman and grocer's boy and the joy of doing an honest day's work, all the while keeping a wry eye on the childish pique of her employers.

One Pair of Hands is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining memoir of life upstairs and downstairs in the early 1930s.

Reviews

Glorious entertainment

—— Daily Mail

Riotously amusing

—— The Times

There is much to admire in this book ...to retell the history of democracy so vividly is no mean feat. His work serves as an important reminder that the price of democratic freedom is eternal vigilance

—— BBC History Magazine

Includes all democracies - past and present, questioning our views, how they came about, and who fought for the cause and why

—— Bookseller

He writes lucid, accurate prose that carries heavy freights of information lightly

—— A.C. Grayling , Independent on Sunday

[Roger Osborne] impresses with another sweeping history

—— OPDD

ILLUMINATING AND ENGROSSING ... eloquent and revelatory

—— New York Times Sunday Book Review

FASCINATING ... genuinely illuminating, illustrated with a wealth of compelling detail

—— Spectator

Everybody nowadays seems to take a view on Pakistan. Very few know what they're talking about. Anatol Lieven is that rare observer ... Pakistan: A Hard Country ... fills a large gap in our understanding

—— Edward Luce, author of 'In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India'

The publication of Pakistan: A Hard Country could not be more timely ... illuminating as well as entertaining

—— The Spectator

With patience and determination, Lieven observes and records all aspects of the curiosity otherwise known as Pakistan ... A sweeping and insightful narrative

—— Mohammed Hanif , The New York Times

Required reading for anyone interested in history ... timely and thrillingly told

—— Literary Review

Superb...Cleopatra led an epic life, and Schiff captures its sweep and scope in a vigorous narrative aimed at the general reader yet firmly anchored in modern scholarship. The author's greatest strengths remain the lucid intelligence and subtle analysis of personality...Schiff reanimates [Cleopatra] as a living, breathing woman: utterly extraordinary, to be sure, but recognizably human.

—— Los Angeles Times

Stacy Schiff draws a portrait worthy of her subject's own wit and learning...Ms. Schiff manages to tell Cleopatra's story with a balance of the tragic and the hilarious...[and] does a rare thing: She gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist.

—— Wall Street Journal

Captivating...Ms. Schiff strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor. In doing so, she gives us a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation, and a wide, panning, panoramic picture of her world....Writing with verve and style and wit, Ms. Schiff recreates Cleopatra's lavish courting of Antony (including one dinner in which there was a knee-deep expanse of roses and some of the attendees received not gift baskets but furniture and horses decked out in silver-plated trappings) and his even more extravagant offerings to her (including the library of Pergamum and a host of territories which gave her dominion over Cyprus, portions of Crete and all but two cities of the thriving Phoenician coast). For that matter, Ms. Schiff even manages to make us see afresh famous scenes like Antony's painful death after his defeat at the hands of Octavian, and Cleopatra's subsequent suicide.

—— The New York Times

A swift, sympathetic life of one of history's most maligned and legendary women.

—— Kirkus

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