16 saturday review Saturday May 28 2022 | the timesI
t’s a shame the French junked their
monarchy, if only because they used to
be world leaders in the field of royal
epithets, from Louis the Fat and Louis
the Indolent to Charles the Bald and
Charles the Simple. Their bitchy creativity
put other kingdoms to shame, not least
England, where we have coined only
cringing reminders of our persecution:
William the Conqueror, Bloody Mary.
One of France’s most intriguing nick-
naming incidents occurred in the reign of
Charles VI, from 1380 to 1422. For a glori-
ous few years he was given an easy ride as
Charles the Beloved. Then he became
commonly referred to as Charles the Mad.
The king lost his good reputation when he
started ranting about his body being made
entirely of clear crystal glass, a relatively
new innovation in Europe.
This conviction stayed with him for the
rest of his reign, necessitating a range of
adjustments at court. Royal tailors fitted
into his clothing iron rods designed to stop
his limbs from shattering. Jousting was offCharles the Mad and a
‘headless’ clockmaker
feature in this lively
history of delusion.
Review by Ethan Croft
arabian knightsbridge Gold cars owned by Saudis on the streets of central Londoneffects of typhoid, syphilis or Parkinson’s.
Through archival research Shepherd
discovers that Margaret Nicholson, an
Englishwoman who claimed to be the
rightful queen and tried to stab George III
in August 1786, had been jilted by a lover
and left with her reputation in tatters
shortly before the apparent attempt at reg-
icide. Another unfortunate, James Tilly
Matthews, returned to London from revo-
lutionary France in 1796 after a stint in a
Jacobin jail to find his business bankrupt
and his wife and child destitute. Little won-
der he came to believe the French revolu-
tionaries were using mind-control gas to
bring down the British government, andable, particularly among debut authors.
Scattered yarns are gathered, then
stitched up with an introduction and con-
clusion to suggest some common thread.
On the face of it the subject of delusion
suits that approach. A few entertaining
case studies might tell the general reader
more than psychobabble and statistics.
Shepherd does a jolly good job of sug-
gesting causes for her subjects going
crackers. Charles VI may have been sent
doolally by typhoid, for instance. Likewise
the mysterious “Madame M”, a Parisian
woman who became convinced her family
had been kidnapped and replaced by du-
plicates, may have been suffering the after-mad dash An etching showing Margaret Nicholson’s attempt to stab George IIIHelp, I’m made of glass!
the cards. And he wasn’t much use on the
battlefield. When his army faced Henry V
at Agincourt, it was led by a mere lord.
Charles’s ordeal forms one chapter in
Victoria Shepherd’s attempt at a history of
delusion. The BBC Radio 4 producer has set
herself quite a task. The most venerable
previous attempt is probably The Anatomy
of Melancholy, an encyclopaedia of mental
ailments compiled in the 17th century by
Robert Burton, an Oxford don. Shepherd
writes about Burton’s endeavour and how it
ended with him succumbing to one of the
afflictions he chronicled; in 1640 Burton
took his life in his Christ Church study
because an astrological star map told himhe was due to die. Although it’s a tricky
subject, Shepherd manages to keep her
head throughout. Instead of Burton’s
comprehensive, multi-volume approach,
she constructs A History of Delusion
through a series of short, detailed psychobi-
ographies. Her subjects are not all as conse-
quential as a king of France — they range
from diplomats to domestic servants.
It’s another example of the scrapbook
approach to non-fiction that is so fashion-London’s most luxurious hotels) to Walker
(who sorts out domestic difficulties for
ultra-rich families) and Buffer, who de-
flects questions about the Duke of West-
minster’s Grosvenor estate.
Knowles travels on foot, something that
her subjects, cocooned in luxury cars, pri-
vate jets and yachts, do rather rarely. Her
landscapes range from hipster Shoreditch
in east London to Virginia Water in Surrey
(where the gated communities remind her
of Johannesburg), via the fleshpots of
Mayfair, Chelsea and Kensington. Her eye
for detail and knack for analogy suggest a
promising future career as a travel writer
should she get bored of her job as a sociolo-
gy professor at Goldsmiths, part of the
University of London. The crowds of com-
muters heading out of London Bridge
station, she writes, are “like a protest
march without the placards”.
Her distaste for her subjects steers clear
of lazy lampooning. Indeed, the pages are
laced with tacit sympathy for the prisoners
of the golden cages and those they mis-treat. “Money confers the authority to
humiliate,” she notes drily. That corrodes
souls on both sides of the transaction. She
could have probed harder into the motiva-
tions, presumably masochistic, of those
who choose to spend their lives servicing
the witless and paranoid.
A book like this could easily descend in-
to voyeurism and prurience — such vul-garity, my dear — against a backdrop of
sneaking envy, but she steers clear of these
traps. Serious Money has a serious mission.
These vast fortunes, she argues, do not just
make people miserable. They are rotting
the ties that hold our society together.
London, she writes, “is an experiment in
the social consequences of the coexistenceof want and wealth”. It is not proving very
successful. “As the wealthy residents in-
crease, so do the ranks of the dispos-
sessed,” she says. “A direct line can be
drawn between London’s housing and
social welfare crisis and the super-rich.”
This argument rests more on assertion
than reason. Other authors — notably
Oliver Bullough in Moneyland and Butler
to the World — have done a better job in
explaining how anonymous fortunes swirl
through the sewers of our financial system
and stifle our politics. Knowles takes a
more sweeping approach. Her loosely
drawn sketches of institutional villains
(private equity and hedge funds) contrasts
with the sharply defined individuals that
bring her story to life. All big fortunes, she
implies, are suspect, whether from coloni-
al plunder or modern kleptocracy. “Impe-
rialism’s industrial, artistic and cultural
swagger are stamped into the streets of
Kensington. This was always dirty money.”
One can imagine Dave and Deidre Spart
clenching their fists in approbation.L
ondon’s super-rich, according to
Caroline Knowles, are its “most
troubling and secretive pres-
ence”. Her book will help readers
to see them as less secretive, more
troubling and a great deal sadder. The an-
onymised plutocrats and their hangers-on
who fill the book, which is all the more
scathing by the understatement with
which Knowles depicts them, reflect limit-
less arrogance, waste and injustice. The ex-
cesses of planet plutocrat are particularly
shocking because they happen alongside
the world in which the rest of us live.
The characters in this latter-day Canter-
bury Tales include Quant, who writes algo-
rithms for a bank, the posh ex-colonial
Blazer, and Soviet, a nostalgic Russian
squillionaire. The supporting cast ranges
from Cop (the head of security at one ofbooks
Inside the
gilded cage of
the super-rich
Edward Lucas takes
a rage-inducing tour
through ‘plutocratic
London’, from
Mayfair to Shoreditch
STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PAThey are plagued by
anxieties. Someone
else may have more
money or nicer things
THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUMSerious Money
Walking Plutocratic
London
by Caroline KnowlesAllen Lane, 304pp; £25A History of
Delusions
The Glass King, a
Substitute Husband
and a Walking Corpse
by Victoria ShepherdOneworld, £16.99; 352ppMadame M was
certain her family had
been kidnapped and
replaced by duplicates