SYNOPSIS

SCATHINGLY, Oliver Bullough compares the UK to Wodehouse’s inscrutable butler, Jeeves.

Just as Jeeves tirelessly helped the “quarter-witted Bertie Wooster evade the consequences of [his] misbehaviour, Britain helps the world’s financial criminals and tax dodgers . . . enjoy the fruits of their crimes free of scrutiny”.

In January 2022, Lord Agnew of Oulton, the minister in charge of combating fraud, resigned, citing “arrogance, indolence and ignorance” within government.

Just a few weeks later, Russia’s invasion meant that political promises to deal with oligarchs were hastily remembered.

Yet, underfunded and demoralised law enforcement agencies face an unequal battle. Bullough’s highly readable account of the UK’s role in facilitating global financial wrongdoing is a call to action.

– Butler To The World by Oliver Bullough is published by Profile, 304pp

---

Isabella Whitney,

the pioneering poet

Isabella Whitney is not a name that is well known, yet she many have been the UK’s first female professional poet. She published two books of poetry (in 1567 and 1573) and, from the way she described herself, it seems that she was single, poor and suffering from ill health. Some of this may have represented an attempt to inspire sympathy in her readers. However, judging by her writing, it appears that she knew what it was to be living on the margins, plagued by anxiety and insecurity.

Whitney wrote of London’s beauties and riches, but also of its “stynking streetes”, its “lothsome Lanes” and its many prisons, including those that incarcerated debtors. Her depiction of the capital showed a city humming with mercantile activity and crammed with expensive goods for sale. Yet her verses also sketched out the damage that the pursuit of wealth had done to society as a whole.

As a poet and writer, she took inspiration from her male counterparts – but she wrote as a woman, painfully aware of the difficulties that women in London might encounter. She warned readers against flattery and deceit, and against those who shed “crocodile tears”; in particular, she advised young women never to trust a man at first sight. On this subject she made it clear that she was writing from her own personal experience of duplicity, describing herself as one “who was deceived”.

Whitney may not have been a poet to rank among the greatest names of the Elizabethan age but her voice was distinctive, eloquent, ironic and powerfully evocative of a woman’s experience.