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Behind Closed Doors

On sale

25th May 2023

Price: £24.99

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Selected: Audiobook Downloadable / ISBN-13: 9781405559355

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With a keen eye for the juicy anecdote, Thévoz tells the fascinating and entertaining story of the rise, decline and resurgence of London’s private members’ clubs, from the late-eighteenth century to the present day. In doing so he looks at cultural and political developments beyond the clubs, revealing how while the clubs may have been products of their city and country, they also exerted significant influence on London, Britain and places far beyond.

This is a chronicle, as informative as it is entertaining, of the ups and downs of London clubland, and how it had an impact on parts of the world far from London. It is packed with amusing anecdotes and illustrative examples of the growth of this quirky, unique institution, which grew to spread around the world. London, though, with its four hundred clubs, was always at its heart.

Thévoz reveals how everything we might have thought we knew about these clubs is wrong. They may have started out as white, male, aristocratic watering holes – but that’s only part of the story. All sections of society built their own clubs and lived their lives there: highbrow and lowbrow; women and men; working-class, middle-class and upper-class; international and British. The club has been central to a distinctively British form of leisure over more than three centuries.

Behind Closed Doors is a distillation of a decade of research and writing on London clubs, based on exclusive behind-the-scenes access to archives and proceedings, as well as a love of gossip and scandal.

Reviews

Michael Portillo, Times Radio
It's a very interesting book indeed
Jonathan Parry, London Review of Books
A fair-minded overview of three hundred years of club history, neatly researched and quite fact-heavy, but overwhelmingly preoccupied with carnal and financial appetites
Financial Times
This well-researched romp through the history of the capital's private members' clubs overturns many myths along the way...Compendious and entertaining, Behind Closed Doors is the result of thorough research, lightly worn. Thévoz writes with energy, conviction and amusement at the ever-changing variety of human congregation and its foibles
Air Mail
Keen to debunk myths...Startling...Thévoz gleefully punctures the notion that clubs were a male bastion
Observer
A lively and comprehensive study of London clubs ... an entertainingly readable and well-researched glimpse into a world
Anne de Courcy, Daily Telegraph
Thévoz...is clearly a brilliant researcher. He is very good on the history of clubs and the buildings that house them. As for what went on behind those closed doors, there are riveting snippets between great chunks of earnest fact
Buzz magazine
Seth Alexander Thévoz is a wonderful, impressively well-informed tour guide, leading you past the heavily guarded Porter's Lodge into the vaulted halls of clubland...meticulous...genuinely hilarious
Lesley A. Hall
Admirably broad reach...does a great job of demythologising
Peter Oborne, Byline Times
Superb
Guardian
An entertaining glimpse into an anachronistic world
Alexander Larman
An excellent book.
Dr Fern Riddell
This brilliant book...It is EXTREMELY timely, well told and glorious fun. 10/10
Dr Matt Cole, University of Birmingham
A great read - rich in evidence and robust in analysis. And full of stories told with dry wit
Sunday Times
Thévoz...offers much more than tales of delicious eccentricity, pink gins or popping monocles. He's a serious researcher, and offers a lively, exhaustively comprehensive, soup-to-cigars history of this cosy but often corrupt institution
Dr Tim Stanley
Very good
Michael Meadowcroft, former Liberal Democrats MP
I enjoyed it greatly! It is a remarkable collection of history, anecdote and reference and I'm baffled at how you had any time to eat or sleep whilst researching all the material!
David Palfreyman, author of, London’s Pall Mall Clubs (2019).
Superb...finished it in two evenings...Impressively wide-ranging and deeply analytical
Malcolm Shifrin, author of, Victorian Turkish Baths (2015)
Most enjoyable...gave me just exactly the background to the London clubs which I needed
The Times
[A] secretive world of arcane rules, unbelievable anecdotes and disreputable behaviour
Jonathan Lynn, co-author of YES, MINISTER and YES, PRIME MINISTER
Hugely entertaining and full of stuff I didn't know I wanted to know, but I now do know, and I'm delighted by it
Dr Kate Lister, Betwixt the Sheets podcast, HistoryHit
Utterly fascinating
Times Literary Supplement
Exuberant, rollicking...Behind Closed Doors is full of amusing anecdotes and waspish character sketches...Thévoz, who is the librarian of the National Liberal Club, clearly knows at first hand what has been going on behind the "closed doors" of his title
The Chap
A splendid new tome
The Week
Highly knowledgeable
Hatchards bookshop, Piccadilly
Equal parts entertaining and intriguing
Ben Schott
Very much enjoying this splendid volume