Patrick Mauriès

Patrick Mauriès who for several years worked with Roland Barthes, edits the French literary magazine Le Promeneur and the Italian arts journal FMR. He is the author of Apologie de Donald Evans, a study of intellectual life in France, and of a book on camp. His De la Mondanité will be published next year.

Diary: Halfway between France and Britain

Patrick Mauriès, 3 November 1983

When I came to Britain from France, I happened to have with me Josephine Tey’s curious book Daughter of Time, a detective novel set entirely in a hospital bedroom, which is also an apologia for Richard III. Imagine my surprise when, in the tube from Heathrow, there came in and sat down opposite me a young and rather austere woman who was reading, with the appropriate detached bespectacled air, the latest of the Ricardian Society’s Bulletins. And she wore, like some pop-star badge, an enamel medallion exhibiting a boar – the emblem of her favourite king. To my regret, I could not make out whether she was also wearing the ring and bracelet which usually go with the medallion.–

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