Vickery's Behind Closed Doors once again displays the expert scholarship, interpretive nuance, and deft writing that makes her work a pleasure to read. What Vickery illuminates, often brilliantly, always entertainingly and through a myriad of examples from many different people, are the ways in which family and gender relations were played out in Georgian England.

When he comes to commiserate with her, his guard is down and she slips sixteen crushed-up pills into his drink. But when I knelt down beside her and found her body cold and rigid, I thought about the terrible death she must have endured. His career as a top attorney (he has never lost a case) prosecuting men who abuse their wives also gives him the resources to provide Grace with anything she wants, even a brand new house, which she will only see after the honeymoon.When Grace tells her friend, Esther, that Jack wants to stay behind and join her in Thailand in a few days so he can catch up on paperwork and sulk about his loss, Esther picks her up and takes her to the airport. Vickery's great skill lies in combining a sharp forensic eye with the ability to spot and tell stories, moving between different scales so smoothly that you can't see the joins. Inspection copies are books under consideration as required or recommended reading for an upcoming course. These will make be bigger contributions to better governance than the plethora of corporate regulation that is being developed and implemented globally.

In its scope, originality and potential impact, I can only compare it to Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957): it deserves the widest possible readership.A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. Children’s Care is a system where fathers are ignored, and mothers are punished for experiencing abuse. In this brilliant work, Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there.