Book Reviews

Location: The Green Room, Pimlico Wilde, Mayfair

Attendees:

• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)

• Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder; Acting Secretary)

• Lord E. Northcote

• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Cultural Historian)

• Hugo Van Steyn

• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)

• Max Duclos (Collector)

• Pascal (Afghan hound, unusually restless, attempting to gnaw at a recently popped cork)

Book Discussed:

Across the Grey Channel: The Life and Swim of Dorothea Pengelly, 1817,1883 by Miranda Hesketh (Severn & Trent Press, 2026; richly footnoted, with maps of tidal patterns and reproductions of Pengelly’s personal log).

1. Opening Remarks

Molyneux described the book as “half triumphal biography, half meteorological almanac,” and praised the publisher’s decision to bind it in sea-green linen “that already smells faintly of brine.”

2. Discussion Summary

• Dr. Lorrimer found the work “an extraordinary story of a vanished heroine,” noting that Pengelly’s 1829 swim from Fishguard to Rosslare (just over 50 miles) was dismissed in its day as either “a hoax or hysteria.” Lorrimer praised Hesketh for combing Admiralty records to confirm Pengelly’s feat.

• India Trelawney admired the portraits of Dorothea in her ungainly woollen bathing dress, remarking that her achievement “redefined both endurance sport and women’s apparel.” She suggested the book was “ripe for adaptation into an opera.”

• Lord Northcote expressed skepticism: “The notion that a woman in 1829 swam the Irish Sea in a gale, with nothing but beef tea and stubbornness, beggars belief.” He hinted that Hesketh was “too credulous by half” in her reading of the surviving diaries.

• Hugo Van Steyn countered that the mix of nautical charts, tide tables, and local folklore gave the book “a conviction that defies cynicism.” He noted that the descriptions of coastal cheering crowds were “worthy of Turner, if Turner had painted applause.”

• Max Duclos grumbled that the book was “all waves and wind,” and would have been improved by “at least one murder or jewel theft.” Nonetheless, he conceded that the passages describing jellyfish encounters were “gripping in their horror.”

• Fiona d’Abernon praised the poignancy of the epilogue, in which Dorothea,by then elderly and ignored,was asked if she would do it again, and replied: ‘Only if Wales were still worth leaving.’

3. Objects on View

• An original cork-and-whale-skin swimming costume from 1825, (on loan from the Fishguard Maritime Museum)

• A framed lithograph of Rosslare Harbour, c.1830.

• A silver hip flask, said to have belonged to Pengelly’s brother, inscribed “To warm what the sea chills.”

4. Refreshments

• Aperitif: Gin with tonic water and seaweed garnish.

• Canapés: cockles in garlic butter, smoked mackerel pâté on rye, miniature Welsh rarebit.

• Main wine: Muscadet Sèvre et Maine, 2021.

• Dessert: sea-salt caramel tart, followed by coffee “stiff enough to revive a drowning swimmer.”

5. Other Business

• August Book: The Melancholy of Keys: A Study in Everyday Symbolism confirmed as next selection (with some muttering from Duclos).

• Proposal from Trelawney for a possible field trip to Fishguard or Rosslare to “feel the air she breathed.” Tentative agreement, subject to funding.

• General consensus that Dorothea Pengelly, whether myth or marvel, deserves a blue plaque and a warmer place in history.

6. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 11:32 PM.

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

Location: The Red Room, Pimlico Wilde, Mayfair

Attendees:

• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)

• Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder; Acting Secretary)

• Lord E. Northcote

• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Cultural Historian)

• Hugo Van Steyn (Heckle’s)

• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)

• Max Duclos (Collector)

• Pascal (Afghan hound)

Book Discussed:

Fringes of Glory: Moustache Fashions In Pre-Waterloo France, 1790,1815 by Étienne Chabert (privately printed, Lyon, 1987; limited run of 300; illustrated with hand-coloured engravings of moustaches, pomades, and barber’s chairs).

1. Opening Remarks

Molyneux introduced the book as “a work of heroic necessity,” noting that Chabert had documented no fewer than 412 moustache boutiques in Napoleonic Paris. He called it “equal parts comic opera and cultural history,” pointing out how timely was an investigation into Napoleonic moustaches. He looked forward to the sequel, rumoured to be provisionally titled Did Competitive Moustacherie cause the American Revolution?

2. Discussion Summary

• Dr. Lorrimer applauded the detail with which moustache typologies were catalogued (e.g., the aigrette, the fanfaron, the petit canon). She questioned, however, whether Chabert had inflated their political symbolism: “Not every whisker can carry the weight of the Revolution.”

• India Trelawney was delighted, declaring the book “a grooming history disguised as social critique.” She confessed a fondness for the shop advertising “waxes for heroes and cowards alike.”

• Lord Northcote dismissed much of the text as “folklore masquerading as scholarship,” though he conceded that the chapter on moustache censorship in occupied Vienna was “worthy of note.” He added, with some vehemence, that moustaches are “not a subject for ladies.”

• Hugo Van Steyn defended the perceived frivolity of the book: “We are drowning in catalogues of vestments and shadows. A little hair above the lip is welcome.” He particularly admired Chabert’s reproduction of a barber’s bill for “two pomades and one whispered compliment,” and wished his barber would allow him to pay in such a manner. On realising that he had never actually suggested such an arrangement, he vowed to see whether his next visit to the barbers could be paid for with a compliment.

• Max Duclos grew impatient, arguing that the book was “ephemeral fluff,” though he admitted to being amused by the footnote tracing the rise in wax prices to Napoleon’s Continental System.

• Fiona d’Abernon found herself unexpectedly moved by the final engraving of a barber shutting his shutters on the eve of Waterloo: “It is a moustache elegy, whether he meant it or not.”

3. Objects on View

• A set of moustache combs in tortoiseshell (loaned from Van Steyn’s collection)

• A jar of period-style moustache pomade, whose scent divided the room

• A caricature by Gillray lampooning French officers’ facial hair (on loan from Northcote)

4. Refreshments

• Aperitif: Kir with cassis from Dijon

• Canapés: miniature croque monsieur, radishes with salted butter, duck rillettes on toast

• Main wine: Bordeaux, Château Lagrange 2012

• Dessert: chocolate mousse “with a flourish” (served with spun-sugar moustache decorations, to general groans)

5. Other Business

• July Book: The Silence of Shadows: A Comparative Study of Umbra in Netherlandish Still Life (previously postponed) reconfirmed as the next reading.

• Proposal from Trelawney for a themed salon later in the year: “Fashion in the Margins,books devoted to the frivolous or forgotten.” Tentative enthusiasm.

• General agreement that Fringes of Glory is indispensable, and should be given to everyone in England by government decree.

6. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 11:10 PM after Pascal attempted to eat one of the spun-sugar moustaches and was led gently away.

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

We cordially thank Ms d’Abernon, Mr Wethercombe, and Lord Northcote for their spirited contributions to what has become, in recent weeks, the most fastidiously mannered quarrel to grace our Letters page since the Great Footnote Dispute of 2024.

While we appreciate the high style (and the canine diplomacy) on display, we must remind correspondents that this is not, and will not become, the official noticeboard of the Mayfair Book Groupette’s admissions process. We sympathise with Mr Wethercombe’s plight, though we note that his novel is enjoying a healthy sales bump as a result of this correspondence,a phenomenon which will, we suspect, be regarded by some as better than entry to the ancient society.

We trust that all parties will now sheathe their pens, pour themselves a suitable fortified wine, and allow our readers to resume their customary diet of medieval discussions, modernist squabbles, and occasional angry notes about the correct plural of octopus.

The matter is, for our purposes, closed.

, The Editor

Sir,

It is with a heavy but disciplined heart that I write to draw a discreet curtain across the recent exchange between Mr Wethercombe and Ms d’Abernon regarding the Mayfair Book Groupette.

As a long-serving member of this most esteemed of societies, I can assure your readers that the Groupette does not, as Mr Wethercombe insinuates, derive any pleasure from excluding applicants. We derive it from selecting them. There is a distinction, though I appreciate it may be invisible to those unaccustomed to life beyond the velvet rope.

The admissions process,so tediously caricatured in these pages,exists for the same reason the Musée du Louvre does not hang every watercolour of a yacht that arrives at its gates. Standards must be upheld, and they are, if anything, more fragile in the realm of ideas than in the realm of oils and gouache.

Mr Wethercombe’s allusions to Pascal’s supposed “backward curl” are beneath reply, save to note that the hound has been known to take the same position toward visiting dignitaries, senior curators, and on one occasion a former Prime Minister. He is impartial in his disdain.

The Groupette has no wish to prolong this public correspondence, nor to weaponise your Letters page as an adjunct of our selection committee. I will simply observe that those who wait outside our doors may, in time, come to value the waiting more than the entry. For some, this becomes a kind of intellectual home. For others, it appears to become a book.

Yours faithfully,

Lord E. Northcote

Mayfair, London

Sir,

I am gratified that my modest literary debut, the novel Waiting for Pascal, has generated such spirited correspondence, even from within the ranks of its ostensible inspiration.

Ms. d’Abernon’s letter, while exquisitely phrased, rather confirms my central thesis: that the Mayfair Book Groupette’s admissions process is a byzantine pageant designed less to identify potential members than to remind them how very far they have to climb.

I take issue, however, with her suggestion that I was “oppressed” by the requirements. On the contrary, I found them invigorating – though I do wonder how my essay “Why Ulysses is a Terrible Book” could be dismissed in under a minute for “inappropriate whimsy.” I believe my description of this tome (consisting of certain observations regarding hedgehogs and teeth-brush) was entirely reasonable.

As to the misplaced paperback in Pimlico Wilde’s reading room, I located it in just under 46 minutes,only to be told that the test was invalid because I had not, in the process, paused to admire the dust-jacket typography.

Regarding the Afghan hound: I have the utmost respect for Pascal’s ceremonial role. Still, one cannot ignore that, after our brief meeting, he yawned twice, refused a proffered morsel of pão de ló, and promptly curled up with his back to me. If this was not a veto, it was, at the very least, an early warning.

Finally, Ms. d’Abernon writes that the waiting list is a “curated experience.” I applaud this. It is rare indeed to encounter curation so stringent that the object never actually enters the collection.

I remain, as ever, outside the Green Room. But I have grown used to the view.

Yours with measured affection,

Lionel Wethercombe

Author, Waiting for Pascal

Sir,

I read with unmatched incredulity your recent review of Lionel Wethercombe’s novel Waiting for Pascal, in which an ancient Society, the Mayfair Book Groupette – thinly disguised as “The Bibliotemporal Circle”, is depicted as some sort of social-literary oubliette where hopeful applicants moulder indefinitely in silk-lined purgatory.

Permit me to correct several grave misconceptions.

First, the assertion that our admission process is “arcane” is preposterous. It is in fact too transparent. All applicants are given the same perfectly straightforward requirements, which change on a regular basis to keep things fresh. Currently we ask applicants to: (1) write an essay on Why Ulysses is a Terrible Book demonstrating both intellectual rigour and a certain flair for malice; (2) discover the location, within 47 minutes, of a deliberately misplaced paperback in the Pimlico Wilde reading room; and (3) survive an 11-minute cross-examination by three existing members without either repetition or clichés. If Mr Wethercombe found these demands oppressive, the fault lies not in our procedures but in his constitution.

Second, we do not “veto applicants for their aura.” We veto them for things much more important, like misusing the term chiaroscuro in casual conversation, or admiring the work of Marco di Manchester, that halfwitted journeyman painter.

Third, the review insinuates that Pascal, our Afghan hound, wields a decisive influence over membership decisions. This is a vile calumny. Pascal’s role is purely ceremonial. He attends meetings purely in a non-voting capacity.

Finally, the reviewer implies that waiting to join the Groupette is equivalent to literary limbo. On the contrary, the waiting list is a curated experience. Prospective members have been known to improve their reading, wine selection, and wardrobe considerably during the interval. In one notable instance, an applicant entered the list as a dreary accountant and emerged four years later as an accomplished translator of medieval Catalan poetry.

I trust you will grant us the courtesy of publishing this clarification, so that the public may understand we are not the sadistic gatekeepers Mr Wethercombe imagines, but rather guardians of a delicate ecosystem of taste and scholarship.

Yours faithfully,

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary, Mayfair Book Groupette

Mayfair, London

By Lionel Wethercombe

If The Devil Wears Prada had been rewritten by a thwarted member of the London Library after three years on the Mayfair Book Groupette’s waiting list, the result might look something like Lionel Wethercombe’s debut, Waiting for Pascal.

The premise is simple, and almost certainly autobiographical: a man applies to join “a small, exclusive, literary society somewhere north of Piccadilly” and spends the next 312 pages doing absolutely nothing except wait to be accepted. The plot, if one may call it that, is a sequence of increasingly humiliating “application challenges,” ranging from composing a 2,000-word denunciation of Ulysses (“every page like brushing your teeth with a hedgehog”) to being interrogated about the moral resonance of ochre pigment by a woman appearing to wear a dead bird as a fascinator.

Wethercombe has clearly done his homework,or at least his eavesdropping. The Mayfair Groupette, here fictionalised as “The Bibliotemporal Circle,” is rendered in minute, slightly bitter detail: the arcane voting procedures; the unexplained vetoes (“Your aura doesn’t belong in this postcode”); and, of course, the inscrutable Afghan hound, Pascal, who holds the power to make or break a candidate with a single blink.

The problem,or perhaps the point,is that reading Waiting for Pascal feels alarmingly like the process it describes. There is a lot of exquisite set-dressing (inlaid writing desks, uncut pages, wine labels you have to Google), but the narrative moves forward with the stately inevitability of an understaffed parish council. Each chapter promises a decision “soon,” only to deliver another exquisitely irrelevant subcommittee.

It would be unfair to say nothing happens. In Chapter Twelve, the narrator manages to gain “provisional observer status” and attends a meeting devoted to a monograph on ecclesiastical textiles. This is followed by a 14-page description of an embroidered cope that somehow manages to be both ravishing and punitive. In Chapter Nineteen, he attempts to bribe a member with a bottle of pre-decimal Armagnac, only to discover it was already on the club’s “Banned Gifts” list.

To be fair, there are moments of sharp wit. Wethercombe skewers the literary-social complex of Mayfair with surgical precision, noting that “rejection here came not as a blow but as a raised eyebrow,quieter, crueller, and infinitely more expensive.” Yet the novel’s real triumph is its refusal to resolve. By the final page, the narrator is exactly where he began: outside the Green Room, waiting, clutching a notebook and a chilled bottle of something the Groupette will almost certainly disdain.

Some readers will find this infuriating; others will see it as art mirroring life. For the rest of us, Waiting for Pascal is a cautionary tale,proof that in certain corners of literary London, the journey is the destination, and the destination doesn’t want you.

Date: 30th August 2025

Prepared by: Fiona d’Abernon (Acting Secretary)

Subject: Expulsion of Mr. Conrad Smithe for Misrepresentation of Reading

1. Background

At the recent meeting of the Mayfair Book Groupette, convened to discuss The Cartographer’s Melancholy by Jeroen van Holt (limited edition, hand-printed on laid paper with uncut fore-edges), it became apparent that member Mr. Conrad Smithe had not, in fact, read the book despite multiple prior assurances to the contrary.

The Groupette has, since its inception, operated on the unspoken but inviolate principle that one attends having read the book. While lively dissent and selective skipping are tolerated, wholesale fabrication of engagement is not.

2. Evidence of Non-Reading

a) Initial Statement

Early in the evening, Mr. Smithe remarked on “the beautiful chapter about the Venetian gondolier,” to which several members immediately responded with puzzled expressions, as the novel is set entirely in rural Finland and contains no gondoliers.

b) Chronological Discrepancy

When asked about the closing scene, Mr. Smithe claimed it was “a little too sentimental for me,” despite the fact that the ending is a sudden flood and the drowning of the narrator,events entirely devoid of sentimentality.

c) Misuse of Vocabulary

Mr. Smithe repeatedly referred to “the protagonist’s atlas,” whereas in the text the work is always described as “a sea chart” or “the chart,” never as an atlas. Lord Northcote, visibly pained, noted this “betrays an unconvincing familiarity.”

d) Revealing Confession

When challenged during a lull, Mr. Smithe admitted,half under his breath,that he had “skimmed the publisher’s blurb and a review in The Times,” claiming that “life has been impossibly busy.”

3. The Claim

Mr. Smithe’s defence rested on the assertion that “having the gist” was as valuable as reading, and that the discussion benefitted from “outsider impressions.” This was met with quiet but unanimous disapproval. The Groupette regards such rationale as incompatible with its ethos of deep, unhurried engagement.

4. The Apology (Too Late)

After the formal portion of the meeting had concluded, and as coats were being retrieved, Mr. Smithe offered a more contrite apology:

“I’m sorry, truly,I thought I could wing it, and I see now that I’ve underestimated the… rigour here. I won’t do it again.”

While the sincerity of tone was noted, the apology was delivered after a decisive undercurrent had already formed. The Groupette is, as Molyneux observed, “not a place one wings anything.”

5. Decision

Following a brief members-only discussion (Smithe having already departed), it was agreed,by silent show of hands,that Mr. Smithe’s membership be revoked with immediate effect. The Chair will send a courteous letter citing “misalignment with Groupette practice” and “a breach of reading trust.”

6. Reflection

The decision was made without pleasure. Smithe had, in previous months, offered genuine insight and wit. Yet the Groupette’s survival rests on its one fragile rule: that the book has been read, privately, entirely, without pretence. Once broken, the shadow it casts cannot be erased.

Pascal spent the remainder of the evening lying by the empty chair, which felt, to more than one of us, like an accusation.

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette