Minoo Dinshaw

A biography of the historian Steven Runciman. I found it rather heavy going during his childhood, only picking up once people I'd heard of before were introduced. But then it became an absolutely fascinating look at intellectual and celeb life from the 1920s onward.

Minoo Dinshaw’s Friends in Youth is an original take on the issues that divided friends and families in the opening stages of the English Civil Wars. The story unfolds around the formation and dissolution of the Great Tew Circle connected to the aristocrat and intellectual Lucius Cary. As a young man fresh out of university in the 1630s, Cary counted the jurist John Selden, the theologian William Chillingworth, and the poet Edmund Waller among his intimates, as well as many other show more luminaries including Ben Jonson.

The ever observant John Aubrey later described Cary’s home at Great Tew as ‘like a Colledge, full of Learned men’. The group that gathered there and in London was characterised by scepticism about religious dogma and toleration of differing political viewpoints. As Dinshaw demonstrates, they were to be divided by their Civil War allegiances, although they were united in their desire for peace and accommodation. As secretary of state, Cary represented the moderates in Charles I’s early war councils, but lost his life tragically (and vaingloriously) as a royalist volunteer at the first Battle of Newbury in 1643.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/friends-youth-minoo-dinshaw-review

Jackie Eales is President of the British Association for Local History and Professor of Early Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University. show less