The Oldie

FRANCES WILSON

The Russells are moving in. Or rather the Russells are moving up. It’s 1882 and carts of gleaming statuary roll though a sheep-strewn Central Park to the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street.

Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), chatelaine of the sprawling Versailles, whose scaffolding has only just come down, is no one from nowhere, and her husband, George (Morgan Spector), is a railroad billionaire. Peeking through the net curtains of the brownstone

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Oldie

The Oldie4 min read
The Picnic Bible
The joy of the picnic has always seemed peculiarly British. It isn’t simply eating outside — barbecuing in the ‘yard’, as the Americans do — but the act of packing up an entire meal and transporting it to some distant location to eat alfresco. It gai
The Oldie2 min read
Arise, England
Faber, £480pp, £25 The Plantagenet dynasty began with Henry II, who saved his country from anarchy before passing it to his largely-absent son Richard. But between 1199 and 1399, it was their half-dozen successors who —often despite themselves — put
The Oldie4 min read
Dressing Down
In 1978, a few days before she won the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch came to lunch. She and her husband, John Bayley, were good friends of my mother and my stepfather, James Howard-Johnston, a Byzantine historian at Oxford. I was 14

Related Books & Audiobooks