Tag: Bright Young Things

Exhibitions, not a book

Not a Book: Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World

veritywilde

Happy Sunday everyone, I had a really good time out at a gallery on Friday and given that the exhibition is only on until early January, I thought i ought to write about it sooner rather than later.

Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery is an examination of the photographer’s work in Fashion and Portrait photography. It takes you through from his early days and Bright Young Things of the 1920s to the My Fair Lady era in the 1960s. Along side the photographs there are also things like his first camera, which he used all the way through til after he first started at Vogue, and one of the dresses he designed for Julie Andrews to wear as Eliza Doolittle in the West End production of My Fair Lady in the late 19050s.

I didn’t get to see the last Cecil Beaton exhibition at the NPG – because it opened just a few days before Covid shut the world down in 2020 and never reopened. I have the exhibition poster from that on the wall of my house and the exhibition book as well, and that one focused on his work in the 1920s and 1930s with the Bright Young Things. This does have some of that, but is much broader in its scope. Yes the famous Stephen Tennant picture is here, but so also are the royal portraits and Hollywood royalty – like Marlon Brando, Katherine Hepburn and a young Yul Brynner with hair!

I really enjoyed myself – it’s in the same space that The Culture Shift exhibition was in earlier in the year which is big enough that you feel that there is plenty to see and that everything has space to breathe but not so big that you get overwhelmed by it all and start to lose focus.

Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World is on at the National Portrait Gallery until January 11, and I would book your ticket in advance, especially if you’re planning on going at a weekend.

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Mitford-related books

veritywilde

I’m trying to be timely this week – there’s a drama series about to start about the Mitford sisters, so I’ve been back through my reading lists to come up with some ideas for anyone who watches the series and wants to know more!

So lets start off with Nancy Mitford’s own The Pursuit of Love. The Radletts are based on Nancy’s own family and you follow them through their adventures and love affairs in the years between the Wars. It’s a funny and smart social satire and I raced through this when I first read it, and went straight on to Love in a Cold Climate. Nancy was one of the Bright Young Things after she made her society debut and her writing (like her friend Evelyn Waugh’s) is full of real people and incidents that she has fictionalised – some times very, very lightly.

Jessica Mitford also wrote her own memoir of the family – Hons and Rebels. Now if you watched the trailer for outrageous above, you may have noticed that there was a lot of competing politics going on among the siblings. And Decca was the communist (as opposed to Diana who was the Fascist) and so her memoir is very much coming at it all from the perspective of someone who disagrees with the aristocracy and privilege that her family had. She’s not as witty as Nancy, but she’s also maybe not as mean as Nancy could be.

Cover of The Mitford Girls

I read Harold Acton’s biography of Nancy years ago, but I have never got around to Mary Lovell’s Mitford Girls even though I’ve got her Riviera Set on the keepers shelf. So I’m going to take this as a cue that it’s time to finally get around to that, and borrow mum’s copy and read it! But I have read D J Taylor’s Bright Young Things, which covers several of the sisters as it surveys the hedonistic generation of party goers who it has to be said were mostly Not Great People.

Talking of Not Great People, I should add that I have read one of Diana’s books – her biography of the Duchess of Windsor and I do not recommend. Diana was in the Duchess’s social circle and the final line of my good reads review is “Worth reading if only as a lesson to retain your critical faculties when you read any non fiction book to remind yourself what the author’s objectives may be.” Which is to say that it was even more biased than I was expecting it to be, and I was expecting it to be really quite biased. Nany however was actually a good biographer – and her book about Madame De Pompadour is actually pretty good.

If 1920s/1930s society is your sort of wheelhouse, you might also want to check out my Happy Valley Set and non-fiction Rich People Problems recommendsdays and if you’ve got any recommendations for me, please do put them in the comments.

Happy Reading!

books, Classics, crime, Recommendsday, Thriller

Recommendsday: Books with Amazing Houses

veritywilde

So yesterday I took advantage of the last of my post-nightshift days off to go on a family jolly to Blenheim Palace.  It’s less than an hour from home, but surprisingly I’d never been before – perhaps because it’s not National Trust or English Heritage so you have to pay.  It was fabulous – and I got my day ticket converted into a year pass (which doesn’t cost any extra to do) so I can go back again and see some of the bits we didn’t have time for on Tuesday.  Any how, after a day out at a country house, it got me thinking about books which feature amazing houses.  So here’s a few for you for Recommendsday.

Blenheim Palace
OK the sky wasn’t as blue as I was hoping, but at least we didn’t get rained on…

I know it’s totally the obvious choice, but I had to start with Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.  It’s not my favourite Waugh (that’s Vile Bodies) but I know I may be in the minority on that.  I had a massive Waugh kick a couple of years ago and read a whole load of his novels back to back and for the most part they still really work.  Brideshead tells of Charles Ryder’s infatuation with the Marchmains and their upper class and crazy world.  The house is at the centre of it all as a character in and of itself.  Well worth reading if you haven’t already.  I definitely need to watch one or other of the TV/film versions soon.  And read Vile Bodies too.

Next, if you haven’t read any Roderick Alleyn books (and why not?) the first in the series, A Man Lay Dead, is set around a weekend party at a country house where one of the guests ends up dead.  Again, it’s not my favourite of the Alleyns (that’s Artists in Crime) but it’s a really good start to the series and a really good example of a country house murder mystery.

It feels like a while since I mentioned Rebecca on here, which is strange since the Du Maurier classic is one of my mum’s favourite books and I have a lovely Virago hardback copy which sits on my downstairs keeper shelf.  It’s creepy and gothic and has one of the most famous opening lines in literature in “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again”.  If you haven’t read it, why not and if you have go and reread it.  You won’t regret it*.

Finally, if you want something funny, try PG Wodehouse’s Blandings series.  The first one is Something Fresh, where you meet Lord Emsworth, his son Freddie and his secretary The Efficient Baxter and get a taste for the sort of high jinx that ensue.  I think I like them better than the Jeeves and Wooster books, but again I think I’m in the minority there.

I could go on – I haven’t even mentioned I Capture the Castle, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre or The Secret Garden..

All recommendations for more books with amazing houses gratefully received, in the meantime

Happy reading!

*Even if, spoiler alert, you never trust a housekeeper again.

Book previews, books

Autumn New Release Preview

veritywilde

Why hello there.  It’s September.  The schools are going back and the nice weather won’t last.  So to ease your pain, I thought I’d tell you about some upcoming books I’m looking forward to or have been fortunate enough to have already enjoyed.  But if that’s not your bag, here’s my books about schools post from two years ago if you feel the need to start the academic year with a boarding school book or two! So, in no particular order (well not by date anyway) here we go:

Where Am I Now? by Mara Wilson (22 September)

Recognise the name?  Yes, it’s that Mara Wilson – who played Matilda and was in Mrs Doubtfire – now all grown up, she’s written a collection of essays and it’s getting a lot of buzz.  It’s hard to find out what it’s about – from what I can work out it’s part memoir, part life lessons – but I’ve seen lots of good buzz about it – and the early reviews on Goodreads are really positive.  Plus I’ve always wanted to know what she did after she left films.  I’m hoping this will answer some of my questions.  Pre-order on Amazon, Kindle, Kobo, Waterstones, Foyles.

Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple (6 October)

Today Will Be Different follows a day in the life of Eleanor Flood, who knows she’s a mess but wants to tackle the little things to try and get back on track.  Unfortunately today is the day that life is going to get in the way.  I’m a little trepidatious (is that a real word or one that I got from Buffy/Clueless?) about this one.  Will this be Good Semple or Bad Semple?  I loved Where’d You Go, Bernadette, but I detested This One Is Mine to the point that if I hadn’t enjoyed …Bernadette so much I would have DNF’d it.  I like the plot summary and several of the book podcasts I listen to are excited about it, so I’m hoping for the best and going to give it a go. Pre-order on Amazon, Kindle, Kobo, Waterstones, Foyles.

How to Party with an Infant by Kuai Hart Hemmings (8 September)

Single mum Mele is trying to get over her obsession with the father of her daughter by writing an entry for a cookbook writing contest.  Except she’s doing it a little differently and going into “elaborate and shocking detail”. This is a recent addition to the list (and coming out really soon) after I saw it on Book Riot’s What We Read In August list where the contributor said “This made me laugh the way Where’d You Go, Bernadette? did.” and then I had to have it.  Maybe I’ll save it until after I’ve read Today Will be Different in case that’s a disappointment and I need a pick me up! Pre-order on Amazon, Kindle, Kobo, Foyles.

The Wangs vs The World by Jade Chang (3 November)

Charles Wang has lost the fortune he made after he arrived in the US.  Now he’s taking his family on a cross country journey from their foreclosed Bel-Air mansion to New York to pick up his other daughter. But will the journey bring them all back together or will it split them even further apart.  And will they all even make it as far as the other coast, faced with temptations en route?  I just keep hearing about this book.  Everywhere.  So I want to read it.   Pre-order on Amazon, Waterstones, Foyles.

Queen Bees by Siân Evans (8 September)

I’ve actually already read this – after lucking into a preview copy a month or so back.  This is a collective biography of six famous society hostesses in the UK between the wars. It is not the most massively in depth look at any of them – I wanted a little more detail on some of them – but you get a really good sense of the personalities of the women and the rivalries between them.  If you’ve read anything about society in this era (perhaps some of the Mrs Simpson saga, or some of the many timeslip novels set in the 1920s and 30s which feature real people as well fictional ones), you’ll have heard of some or all of these women – Lady Astor (first woman to take up her seat as an MP) and Emerald Cunard are probably the two most well known – but it’s also peppered with other people of the period – like the aforementioned Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII and then Winston Churchill, The Mitfords and the Mosleys.  This is a period I love reading about (and have read quite a lot about) and I enjoyed Queen Bees and felt I learnt stuff from it.  I’ve lent it out already – and will go and find a proper copy in the shop when it comes out so I can check out the bibliography and references – which were missing from my version – to get some more reading ideas.   Pre-order on Amazon, Kindle, Kobo, Waterstones, Foyles.

The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch (3 November)

This is the sixth book in the Rivers of London series and if you’ve been reading my book based ramblings for any length of time, you’ll know how I feel about PC Peter Grant (see here, here and here ) – and be unsurprised that I’m hopping around with excitement at the prospect of the next book.  I’m trying to take my time reading the latest comics so I’ll be bang up to date for this one, which apparently sees Peter, Nightingale and the crew from the Folly trying to solve a bloody, magical problem in mansions of the super-rich in Mayfair.  I can’t wait.  If you’re not already on this bandwagon, do yourself a favour at start at the beginning. Pre-order on Amazon, Kindle, Kobo, Waterstones.

And there you have it.  Five books I’m looking forward to reading and one I’ve already read as a bonus. It may have got a touch long, but I hope you’ve enjoyed it.  Hopefully none of these will end up on the 50-pages and out pile and I can report back in positive terms in a couple of months time.  Please do recommend any more upcoming releases you think I might like in the comments – you know how much I love making the to-read pile bigger – and let me know if you’ve already read any of these and have Thoughts.

Happy Reading