“Dirty Bertie is… a comic history which manages to combine [Clarke's] brand of jaunty, bawdy humour (not mine, I confess) with being genuinely informative about French history.
Clarke claims that there is a gap in the biography of King Edward VII. Biographers have not said nearly enough about Bertie's jaunts to Paris. He is absolutely right about this… The rebuilding of Paris by Napoleon III was partly about making it a capital for sexual tourism. The flâneur could cruise the wide boulevards, picking up women as he strolled. Fashionable restaurants such as the Café Anglais or the Maison d'Or had a respectable public room downstairs where married women could be seen…
But it would be a mistake to take Clarke too seriously. The point of the book is that Bertie is a peg on which to hang a knock-about romp about the Paris sex trade. And there is plenty to say about that.”
Jane Ridley, “The Paris of Napoleon III was one big brothel – which is why the future Edward VII loved it. A review of Dirty Bertie by Stephen Clarke,” The Spectator, 7 June 2014.