Tag: interwar

Exhibitions, not a book

Not a Book: Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World

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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

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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!

mystery, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: More British Library Crime Classics!

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One of the consequences of the Great Steam Scald of Sunday was reading some more of British Library Crime Classics while I couldn’t hold a paperback. Of course as soon as I could I abandoned them in favour of Attack and Decay. But I’ve been planning this post for a while and I’ve now finished the other books I wanted to review so here we are!

Post after Post-Morton by E C R Lorac

When a member of a family of writers dies, it is initially thought to be a suicide – until her brother receives a letter from the deceased, which had got delayed in the post. He calls in Superintendent Macdonald to find out the truth behind his sister’s death. I’ve reviewed a couple of Lorax’s books here before (These Names Make Clues, Murder by Matchlight and Murder in the Mill Race as well as Crossed Skis under one of her other pen names ), and this one is right up there. It has plenty of twists and turns as Macdonald tries to prove whether it was murder or suicide.

The Cheltenham Square Murder by John Bude

Fancy a murder carried out with a bow and arrow? Read this! There’s no shortage of suspects either as several residents of the titular square are keen archers and the murdered man is very unpopular. Solving this is Superintendent Meredith (last seen on this blog in The Lake District Murder) helping out a friend while on holiday. The setting is part of the charm of this – you can really picture the houses clustered around the square and their residents and their resentments and jealousies.

Deep Waters edited by Martin Edwards

This is one of the BLCC’s themed collections – all of the stories here have a nautical theme. There are a bunch of names in this who I have read full length novels from, but by a miracle not any of the other three authors in this post! There is also a huge range of styles of mystery – the authors including Arthur Conan Doyle, Christopher St John Sprigg, Edmund Crispin, Michael Innes and more. They also tend towards the shorter end so if you don’t like one it’s over quickly!

Castle Skull by John Dickson Carr

A blazing body is seen running around in the battlement of Castle Skull near Koblenz – but who did it. The castle is a maze of passages and awash with legends and stories of magic and ghosts. There is a small pool of suspects, and two detectives competing to solve figure it all out. This is the least Verity of all of these – but I include it because although it’s not precisely my thing, it is a good creepy, chillery, thrillery mystery. Atmospheric is probably the word.

All of these were in Kindle Unlimited when I read them, so if you keep a list of books to borrow from that, otherwise the British Library shop is doing Three for Two on the paperback versions.

Enjoy