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“... Charlie (of Norway), Foxy (of Bulgaria), Missy and Mignon. The joke was exploited long ago in Cecil Beaton’s spoof My Royal Past, though Tomlinson’s account of pre and immediately post-war court life makes one think that Beaton hardly exaggerated at all. Tomlinson’s chronicle starts around the turn of the ...”

“... also crucially for my argument knowingly, is enacting on behalf of postwar America. ‘Perhaps,’ Cecil Beaton wrote, ‘she was born just the postwar day we had need of her.’ He could be talking of the First World War: Monroe was born in 1926, an infancy scarred by the Depression along with everything else. But ‘postwar’ can also refer here to the ...”

“... make her both vulnerable and dangerous, ‘a perpetual incumbrance of this kingdom’, as William Cecil said in 1559. She lived in an age of rumours and readiness to believe. It was a time, in the words of Sir John Hayward, whenevery man’s mind was then travailed with a strange confusion of conceits, all things being immoderately either dreaded or ...”

“... shame.’ Wallis Simpson and Edward Windsor on their wedding day, 3 June 1937, photographed by Cecil Beaton. The ‘abdication crisis’, as it became known, in which George’s elder brother, the Prince of Wales, resigned the crown after less than a year as Edward VIII, is now almost out of living memory. It has become as much myth as history. The ...”

“... length by Garbo, preferably for an agonising length of time, was the fast-track to celebrity. Cecil Beaton’s diaries reveal that he spent decades in pursuit of the perfect trophy wife to ornament his stately pile in Wiltshire: when Garbo visited, she was soon, he wrote, ‘on the best of terms with the vicar, the butcher and the ...”

“... usually commissions for magazines, and he restricted the subjects to artists or writers. Unlike Cecil Beaton’s portraits, in which Beaton focused his decorative powers on the sitter to make a flattering and glamorous image, Brandt made little accommodation for the shift in genre. ‘I always take portraits in my ...”