I love the amorous mayhem of Handel’s operas, but have always had my doubts about his oratorios, especially the Messiah. First there’s the bossy compulsion to stand during the “Hallelujah” chorus, just because a spurious tradition says that King George II did so in 1743; once hoisted upright, you have to fidget through endless awkwardly mis-accentuated iterations of “for ever and ever”. I’m also puzzled by the quirks of the biblical text, which are underlined by musical repetition. The soprano rhapsodises like a fetishist about the “beautiful feet” of those who preach the gospel, and the tenor prophesies that “every valley shall be exalted” by the saviour: will salvation really reflate those sagging hollows in the landscape?

But after reading Charles King’s Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah, I have been converted. King doesn’t exactly explicate the phrase he takes for his title, but he points out that Martin Luther King often quoted it in his orations about civil rights, so I probably shouldn’t quibble. More importantly, his book humanises the work’s exalted creators and demonstrates that the Messiah is not a pompous manifesto of faith but a troubled, often desperate quest for consolation. Despite those hectoring hallelujahs, what moves King is the oratorio’s prescription for overcoming personal misery.

King begins with the librettist Charles Jennens, a rich but miserably hypochondriac book collector, haunted by the suicide of a brother who had cut his throat and then for good measure defenestrated himself at the Middle Temple. The biblical quotations that Jennens collaged together for Handel had a secret psychological plot: they were “an affirmation of something Jennens himself had always found it hard to believe in”. Handel too, as seen by King, is a worldly figure, an obese epicure “with prominent jowls and a chin that stairstepped down into his cravat”. His statue in Westminster Abbey shows him pointing a finger heavenwards as he displays a page of the Messiah score that declares his faith in a redeemer; a trumpet pokes out at us, ready to amplify the pious message. But far from ingratiating himself with God, Handel had a diabolical temper and once silenced the uncooperative soprano Francesca Cuzzoni by telling her “I am Beelzebub, the chief of the devils!” and threatening to toss her out of the window.

The soprano who appeared in the first performance of the Messiah, Susannah Cibber, was less turbulent in rehearsals than Cuzzoni but even more flagrant offstage. She was trafficked by her husband, who sold her sexual favours to a crony to defray his debts. Sneaky servants drilled holes in walls to watch her lover “put his privy member between her legs”, and scandal sheets reported on her sensational abduction from a country retreat by a posse of armed thugs. After these infamies, her performance in the Messiah was an attempt to relaunch her career and launder her sullied reputation: early audiences took her delivery of Handel’s solemn recitatives about Christ’s agony to be a personal appeal for restitution, since she, too, was “despised and rejected” and “acquainted with grief”. Supplied with this subtext, the oratorio becomes something of an enjoyably tawdry soap opera.

King, a professor of international affairs in Washington DC, does a fine job of implicating Handel in the conflicts and contradictions of an unsettled society. He first travelled from Hanover to London in 1710, arriving in what seemed to be “a failed state, mired in revolution, political conspiracy and murder”. Installed at the English court, he unofficially spied for his royal patrons at home in Germany while composing music to glorify the local Hanoverians, who captured the crown from the Stuart dynasty in 1714: King argues that the chorus in the Messiah that salutes Christ as “Wonderful, Counsellor, the Prince of Peace” was a coded tribute to George II. Handel’s colleague Thomas Arne, who happened to be Susannah Cibber’s brother, supplied the monarchy with its imperial anthem in “Rule, Britannia!”. Although Britons here boast that they “never never never shall be slaves”, they happily profited from the enslavement of others. Both Jennens and Handel were clients of the South Sea Company, whose “signature money-making venture”, as King notes, was “the involuntary transport of human beings” from Africa to the American colonies. Music, the airiest and most spiritual of arts, is murkily embedded in the realities of politics, commerce and inhuman exploitation.

All the same, King derives an irreligious solace from the Messiah. He turned to it, he reveals, after a time of troubles – first, the morbidly anxious pandemic, then his wife’s serious illness, finally the ghastly day in 2020 when, blocks from his house, Trump’s crazed vigilantes overran the US Capitol. The “messed-up state of everything” left King with a desire for “healing light”; this was supplied by Handel’s tenor who, before he exalts the valleys, conveys God’s reassurance by declaiming, “Comfort ye, my people”. Listening to this at home on their antiquated gramophone, King and his wife burst into grateful tears.

After the recent election, they will be in need of further comfort. But the Messiah, King says, is an admonition “to live bravely in the face of disaster and defeat”, and I hope it sustains him during the next four years of what the tenor rightly calls “iniquity”.

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When Alice Vinten wrote The Real Happy Valley, she intended the book to be a celebration of women in the police force, the real-life accounts of those who served as inspiration for protagonist Sgt Catherine Cawood in Sally Wainwright’s acclaimed BBC drama. Vinten interviewed women officers across Yorkshire who told of their careers on the frontline of policing, as depicted by Sarah Lancashire in the series that was set in the Calder Valley around Halifax.

Instead, the book has prompted a campaign of abuse against Vinten, 42, a former Metropolitan police officer herself, on Twitter, now known as X, including what the author calls an orchestrated campaign of leaving bad reviews and even threats. Worse, she says, they’re from police.

When Vinten was told she ought to be “deep-sixed”, she had to look it up on Google. “Basically, it means that I should be got rid of,” she says. “In other words, it was a death threat.”

Though the bile came mostly from anonymous accounts, they were all, says Vinten, operated by serving or retired police officers.

Vinten served for 10 years with the Met, mainly around the London borough of Islington, as a uniformed constable responding to 999 calls. She left the force in 2015, not long after the birth of her two sons, and after becoming “disheartened” with policing. She now works for the NHS in Southend, where she lives and writes – The Real Happy Valley was published last month by Penguin.

Since publication, Vinten says the abuse against her online has ramped up. There was a call on social media for people to leave one-star reviews on Amazon for her book. She says: “They did, and you can see they’re not verified purchases. They’re not about the book, they’re about me, and they’re from male police officers who have a problem with me.”

One review says: “The author needs to be researched for you to determine if this is a work or [sic] fact or fiction and the motivation for the work. Save your time and money if you want real police stories [from those] who have actually policed the streets for longer than 5 minutes.”

Another adds: “I am all for sexual equality but this author isn’t!”. A third says: “Those however who know Ms Vinted [sic] and her social media posts will see she is actually very anti police, especially male officers for some reason.”

Vinten says she can live with bad reviews. What’s more disturbing is the torrent of abuse she gets, on public social media and in private messages. She says: “On what I call police Twitter, there’s a hardcore of accounts that are all anonymous usernames but all identify as police, either currently serving or having retired or left the force. I’ve had these accounts tell me I’m a vile harridan, and I’ve had my home address published online.

“One account posted the name of my street and told me I should be very careful when I cross the road, and someone actually tweeted a photo of my house. It turned out to be from Google Street View, not someone standing outside, thank God, but they knew the exact address.”

She says she has had “six or seven” bogus complaints made about her work to her current employer. “My bosses are now used to it, and can spot them,” she says. “Then I got told, along with another woman, that I should be deep-sixed. That was quite disturbing.”

Vinten first started to receive abuse when she began tweeting about the death of Sarah Everard at the hands of off-duty Met police constable Wayne Couzens in 2021. She says: “With a bit of distance from working in the Met, and becoming less institutionalised, I realised there were a lot of things from my time that troubled me.”

She began calling out what she saw as misogyny, racism and sexism from Twitter accounts she believed were operated by police officers, resulting in her making a complaint against one Met officer, PC Thomas Karlsen.

Vinten says she was told her complaint would be investigated, and Karlsen resigned from the force in July this year, ahead of a trial which saw him convicted of actual bodily harm. That resulted from Karslen attending a domestic incident in New Malden in November 2022 where he punched and kicked a man at the house in what Detective Chief Superintendent Clair Kelland later called a “shocking” and “completely disproportionate” incident.

“After I complained about Karlsen, that’s when things really ramped up,” says Vinten. “I had made the cardinal sin of turning against the team, the family. It shows why it’s so difficult for women in the police to speak out.”

How does she know the accounts that target her actually belong to police? “I’ve had private messages from women officers telling me exactly who these men are. They’re too scared to speak publicly though.”

Vinten has been called a man-hater and a misandrist. Not true, she says. “Police officers, both men and women, do a very difficult job in very demanding circumstances. I know that first hand. My book is a celebration of women in the police force, not an attack on men.

“But I can’t stand by and watch men who talk about their jobs in the police and at the same time tweet sexist and racist comments. The abuse can be upsetting, and sometimes very sinister, but I suppose that having worked as a police officer does make you a bit stoic about it all.”