Book of the week: Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me

John Sutherland’s ‘eye-opening’ book about the poet and his long-term girlfriend

Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me by John Sutherland

In April 1721, at a villa in Twickenham, a doctor named Charles Maitland deliberately scratched the skin of a three-year-old girl, and rubbed into the wounds pus he had taken from the sores of a smallpox victim. It was the first time anyone in England had been inoculated, said Lucasta Miller in The Daily Telegraph – and the person who made it happen was the child’s mother, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the subject of this “passionate” biography. Lady Mary had come across the procedure while living in Constantinople, during her husband’s posting as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Known at the time as “engrafting”, the practice was common in Turkey, where the pus would be put into walnut shells and strapped onto the patient’s cuts. About a week later, patients would develop a mild fever – and be left with “lifelong immunity”.

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