Wild Mary: The Life Of Mary Wesley

The authorised, and astonishing, biography of Mary Wesley.

Much of the fascination of Marnham's well-researched and admirably impartial book is that it reveals just how autobiographical Wesley's fiction was

A striking portrait not only of an amazing, if strange, woman but of an entire social class

Unpicks the complicated web of deceits and half-truths that surrounded much of her life with wit, patience and skill, providing just the sort of compelling read that Wesley did in her novel

This biography is pure pleasure, a riveting, hilarious tragicomedy of manners... Marnham has disentangled truth from rumour, clarified the many connections between Wild Mary's rackety life and Mary Wesley's fiction, and produced a generous, unsentimental and intelligent portrait of a woman's life and times

Everyone will want to read her story, and I hope they do

Wonderfully readable... a treat of a book: gossipy and funny, but also acutely aware of the currents that pushed this extraordinary woman into producing a body of wise and moving work at an age when most people are getting ready for the grave

Excellent... Marnham has also succeeded in melding this complex narrative with a great deal of historical detail... Wesley was also deeply loved, and Marnham has done a very capable job of explaining why that should be so

Wild Mary is as good a literary biography as you are likely to read, its tales told with exceptional verve and wit

It's an extraordinary story. I've admired the novels of Mary Wesley since I first read them. I like the whole spirit, the zest, the frankness, they're very sexy....but I'd no idea that she'd had a life that I can only describe as raunchy... Patrick Marnham has written it very well. I'm an admirer of his work... Altogether, a very good read

Thoroughly researched, moving and highly entertaining, this portrait of a life spanning almost the entire 20th century contains a tale that would intrigue those who never read a word of Wesley's bestselling novels, while aficionados can track a steady stream of fictional parallels. Wild Mary is a page-turner of a biography, which is precisely what its subject would have wanted

An unexpurgated account of a rackety, free-spirited life that will enchant the romantics and shock the sentimentalists

Patrick Marnham was born in Jerusalem, educated at Oxford and is a member of the English Bar. He is the author of eleven books, has been translated into seven languages and has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Prize, the Marsh Biography Award, and was nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe Award in 1994. He started his career as a reporter on Private Eye and has contributed to many newspapers including The Times, Daily Telegraph, Observer, New York Times and Washington Post. He has been literary editor of the Spectator, was the first Paris correspondent of the Independent, and has worked as a BBC scriptwriter and broadcaster and as a special correspondent and war reporter.

Mary Wesley published her first novel at seventy and went on to write a further nine bestsellers, including the legendary The Camomile Lawn, in a style best described as arsenic without the old lace. Many of her stories were inspired by her experiences during the Blitz, and by her marriages: the first to an aristocrat, a brief and conventional affair, and the second to a penniless writer she adored. 
 
A remarkable book about a remarkable woman, Patrick Marnham's brilliantly researched and wonderfully impartial book disentangles truth from rumour, highlighting the links between Wesley's real life and her fiction.

Patrick Marnham

A beautifully written book – informative and entertaining

Fascinating… Snake Dance is nothing less than the biography of nuclear power, the most awesome force humanity has yet unleashed upon the planet

[Patrick Marnham’s] mastery of a vast trove of material makes him an erudite travel companion…perennially eager to poke about in radiation zones armed only with a wonky Geiger counter and a paper mask

The travel writing is first class… [A] thrillingly ominous account

A superb book on the genesis and use of the atomic bomb

This is a humane and intelligent book, and one in which Marnham has clearly been deeply engaged

The great strength of Snake Dance is to create an atmosphere in which the advent of atomic energy is not just outrageous but tragic

Snake Dance is a hybrid of a film tie-in, travelogue, biography and history. It’s a blend that gels through Marnham’s unwavering verve as he follows the trail of a lethal cargo

From colonial slavery to the blind potential of scientific exploration to enslave us in turn, he makes a circular journey: the nuclear snake eats its own tail

A twisting global journey in his devastating critique of nuclear policy…an honourable refusal to rationalise what boils down to an act of repeated mass murder

A penetrating historical x-ray of the first generation of people to live under the nuclear shadow

A fascinating travelogue taking the reader from Joseph Conrad’s Congo to the Fukushima Nuclear Plant disaster of 2011, via New Mexico… a learned and compelling history of man trying to control the elements. It’s also a clarion call to arms to save ourselves and the planet

When he wrote this book, Patrick Marnham was compared to Bruce Chatwin, and I can see why

Journeys Beneath a Nuclear Sky

The terrifying first use of nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was the most controversial act of warfare in history, dramatically ending the Second World War but ushering in the age of mass destruction. Yet it was also the climax of a story that extends beyond Japan and Washington: the culmination of decades of scientific achievement and centuries of colonial exploitation. 
 
Snake Dance is the account of a journey that turned into a quest to discover how humanity reaches this point. Patrick Marnham travels from the opulent nineteenth-century palaces of King Leopold II of Belgium, built with riches plundered from the Congo, to the lethally derelict nuclear reactor of modern-day Kinshasa. He follows the shipment of Congolese uranium to the deserts of New Mexico for the Manhattan Project’s secret test detonation. Here he uncovers the legacies of Robert Oppenheimer and Aby Warburg, two ‘mad geniuses’ who confronted the devastating power of twentieth-century science in very different ways. 
 
Both men travelled to New Mexico. Oppenheimer was honoured for buiding a bomb, the ancestor of weapons that have enslaved humanity. Warburg, condemned to obscurity and confined to a mental hospital, regained his sanity by studying the rituals of the Native Americans of the Southwest who, for thousands of years, practiced the ritual of the 'snake dance' in an attempt to harness the power of lightening. And it was in New Mexico, at Los Alamos, that the ultimate act of playing God was realised. 
 
The circle is closed in Japan.. Faced with the catastrophe at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant in March 2011, scientific man, like the snake dancers, is faced with a power beyond his control. Spanning three continents and the history of civilisation, Snake Dance is at once an intrepid intellectual adventure and a wake-up call for mankind.

Patrick Marnham

Praise for Snake Dance

A beautifully written book – informative and entertaining

Fascinating… Snake Dance is nothing less than the biography of nuclear power, the most awesome force humanity has yet unleashed upon the planet

[Patrick Marnham’s] mastery of a vast trove of material makes him an erudite travel companion…perennially eager to poke about in radiation zones armed only with a wonky Geiger counter and a paper mask

A beautifully written book – informative and entertaining

Fascinating… Snake Dance is nothing less than the biography of nuclear power, the most awesome force humanity has yet unleashed upon the planet

[Patrick Marnham’s] mastery of a vast trove of material makes him an erudite travel companion…perennially eager to poke about in radiation zones armed only with a wonky Geiger counter and a paper mask

A beautifully written book – informative and entertaining

Fascinating… Snake Dance is nothing less than the biography of nuclear power, the most awesome force humanity has yet unleashed upon the planet

[Patrick Marnham’s] mastery of a vast trove of material makes him an erudite travel companion…perennially eager to poke about in radiation zones armed only with a wonky Geiger counter and a paper mask

Books by Patrick Marnham

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