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12+ Works 1,396 Members 35 Reviews 1 Favorited

About the Author

Ann Wroe writes for The Economist, She is the author of six books including a biography of Pontius Pilate. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Literature.

Includes the name: Wroe Ann

Works by Ann Wroe

Associated Works

The Best American Magazine Writing 2010 (2010) — Contributor — 42 copies
Slightly Foxed 57: A Crowning Achievement (2018) — Contributor — 19 copies

Tagged

Common Knowledge

Birthdate
1951
Gender
female
Nationality
UK
Places of residence
London, England, UK
Education
Oxford University (DPhil|History|1975)
Occupations
editor
Organizations
The Economist
BBC World Service

Members

Reviews

Biographer, obituarist (20 years for The Economist) and poet, Ann Wroe brings together in this volume some of the extraordinary lives that she has memorialised, entwined with some of her own memories and poems. People who will be familiar to most readers and many who will be unknown to most. Her intention has always been to seek the tiny, lesser seen, details that she thinks of as being where the soul in a person resides. Their authentic core perhaps.
½
1 vote
Flagged
Caroline_McElwee | Feb 10, 2024 |
This is the kind of three-dimensional micro-history that can be produced only by an author who is deeply immersed in the primary sources—in the case of A Fool and His Money, it's Ann Wroe's knowledge of the fourteenth-century archives of the southern French town of Rodez that brings this corner of the medieval world to life.

I really appreciated how much detail Wroe was able to wrest from an often-fragmentary source base, and the sympathetic eye with which she studied her cast of quarrelsome characters. (The thread running through the book is a court case involving a pot of gold, but this is not the kind of true crime narrative you can construct with more modern sources—this is more a portrait of a community and way of life using a possible theft as a hook.) So too did I appreciate her thumbnail sketch account of what it was like to work at the archives in Rodez in the early 70s—while almost 40 years and about 500 kilometres separated my postgraduate research experience from Wroe's, there were some hilarious points of commonality.

This is definitely the kind of book that would have benefited from a map, however—I'm not a visual thinker and haven't been to Rodez, so I found it very difficult to picture how the City and the Bourg related to one another spatially.
… (more)
½
 
Flagged
siriaeve | 3 other reviews | May 16, 2021 |
I'm rating this 5 stars because the research was so incredibly well done. The author did a terrific job of sorting out all the conflicting stories of this young man's life. She doesn't come to a conclusion of whether he was Richard, Duke of York or not but leaves you to draw your own conclusions. I will leave my decision with myself.
 
Flagged
ChrisCaz | 6 other reviews | Feb 23, 2021 |
Oh, how I wish more historical biographies were written to be so engaging! I would love to see Ann Wroe try her hand at a similar biography of Judas Iscariot.
 
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johnthelibrarian | 5 other reviews | Aug 11, 2020 |

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Statistics

Works
12
Also by
2
Members
1,396
Popularity
#18,409
Rating
½ 3.7
Reviews
35
ISBNs
45
Languages
3
Favorited
1

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