Ralegh hoped to provoke sympathy, and that would-be captors would be too afraid to come near him for fear of catching the terrible mystery disease.He also hoped his enemies, including King James I, would believe he was too ill to make a dash for freedom The self-inflicted suffering worked. He also feigned madness, crawling on all fours and biting the floor.When those escorting him entered his room, it was the cue for a fit They tried to straighten one of his arms, then a leg But as soon as one limb was forced down, the other flexed. These caused his face to break out in huge yellow and purple blisters. And despite Ralegh’s slow journey to London being a march towards death, there are plenty of adventures, many verging on farce.Ralegh calls on the French physician Dr Guillaume Manoury for potions to induce illness, in particular “vomits”.

It is mapped out in extraordinary detail; there’s barely a conversation had, or meal eaten, that Hyland does not document. It was “not pronounced ‘Rally’, like the bicycle with three gears, or rah-rah-Rahley’ like three cheers, but ‘Rawley’”.Ralegh’s Last Journey follows the final 20 weeks of Sir Walter’s life, from the arrival back at Plymouth after his last, failed voyage to his execution in 1618. Not once in this very scholarly work is everyone’s favourite story mentioned – Ralegh’s laying down of his cloak so that Queen Elizabeth I did not get her feet wet.
The dashing Sir Walter we have grown up with is shown to be very different to the egotistic, vain, deluded and defeated man of his last months This is a little-known slice of a well-known life According to Hyland, we can’t even say his name correctly. But Paul Hyland shows that even a familiar subject has hidden sides.

We think we know everything there is to know about Sir Walter Ralegh: courtier, adventurer, hero and favourite of the Virgin Queen. And if everything in Primary Colors turned out to be gospel, we can allow ourselves the frisson of wondering if even a fraction of Hayman’s horrible “Albion” is Britain today.. Because the thing about fiction is that some or all of it may be based on the truth. To spend time with a book in order to read scandalous revelations about real-life people is not an elevated or honourable thing to do, but it appeals to the gossip-sharing quidnunc in all of us. well, it could hardly be more topical.”Being topical isn’t, of course, what makes a satire a roman-?lef – being a recognisable portrait, whether it’s of Byron, Bragg, Dunne or Blair, is what gives the novel its teeth.

But now – if I told you the book features scientists and dead bodies, ministers being outed and committing suicide… When it was offered to publishers a couple of years ago, there was a different mood in this country towards Tony Blair, and people weren’t disposed to criticise. “It’s Clare Short’s life story, basically,” said Hayman’s publisher, cheryl Robson, “but there are all kinds of spooky correspondences. Elsewhere, a woman cabinet-minister faces a moral dilemma when she discovers the PM’s guilty secret. It’s a demolition project on New Labour, involves a conspiracy by the media and a business consortium to put something nasty in the nation’s food, and it stars a prime minister called Gideon Price who is caught by his wife doing unspeakable things. Ms Hayman is a former associate director at the Royal Court Theatre in London, whose book has had an extraordinarily chequered history – five years of “rave rejection letters” from major publishing houses (HarperCollins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster) who judged it too savage, too shocking or too libellous to get past the learned friends of Number 10.