Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 66 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Cad’s Cadenzas

Christopher Driver, 15 September 1988

William Walton: Behind the Façade 
by Susana Walton.
Oxford, 255 pp., £12.95, February 1988, 0 19 315156 1
Show More
Façade: Edith Sitwell Interpreted 
by Pamela Hunter.
Duckworth, 106 pp., £10.95, September 1987, 9780715621844
Show More
Show More
... At the formative stage Walton was better served. ‘What on earth can I become?’ the young Cecil Beaton once implored a friend. ‘I shouldn’t bother too much’ was the reply. ‘Just become a friend of the Sitwells and see what happens.’ It is hard to imagine how the 17-year-old Christ Church music scholar might or might have not developed ...

Seductress Extraordinaire

Terry Castle: The vampiric Mercedes de Acosta, 24 June 2004

‘That Furious Lesbian’: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta 
by Robert Schanke.
Southern Illinois, 210 pp., £16.95, June 2004, 0 8093 2579 9
Show More
Women in Turmoil: Six Plays 
by Mercedes de Acosta, edited by Robert Schanke.
Southern Illinois, 252 pp., £26.95, June 2003, 0 8093 2509 8
Show More
Show More
... been found to be between 40 and 55’.) ‘She’s done me such harm,’ Garbo complained to Cecil Beaton, ‘has gossiped so and been so vulgar. She is always trying to scheme and find out things and you can’t shut her up.’ Despite the Lugosian looks, Garbo concluded, de Acosta was ‘hopelessly feminine’, someone who needed ‘to possess and ...

In His Pink Negligée

Colm Tóibín: The Ruthless Truman Capote, 21 April 2005

The Complete Stories 
by Truman Capote.
Random House, 400 pp., $24.95, September 2004, 0 679 64310 9
Show More
Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote 
edited by Gerald Clarke.
Random House, 487 pp., $27.95, September 2004, 0 375 50133 9
Show More
Show More
... her out), Daisy Fellowes (her face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire ...

Futility

Gabriele Annan, 27 September 1990

Garbo: Her Story 
by Antoni Gronowicz.
Viking, 476 pp., £15.99, August 1990, 0 670 83651 6
Show More
Show More
... groping and salivating on the Onassis yacht, and a total disavowal of the famous interlude with Cecil Beaton. If Gronowicz’s transcriptions are to be believed, Greta Garbo kept no soft spots for ex-lovers. Except for her Svengali, the director Mauritz Stiller; and even then it wasn’t so much a soft spot as a wound. The Oxford Companion to Film says ...

When the Mediterranean Was Blue

John Bayley, 23 March 1995

Cyril Connolly: A Nostalgic Life 
by Clive Fisher.
Macmillan, 304 pp., £20, March 1995, 0 333 57813 9
Show More
Show More
... but not so far from his one-time prep school, St Cyprian’s. There he had met George Orwell and Cecil Beaton, and the three began to develop their characteristic talents: Orwell by reading Gulliver’s Travels and brooding satirically on the horrors to be enshrined later in Such, Such Were the Joys; Beaton by singing ...

Mother

Wendy Steiner, 19 October 1995

Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures 
by Renate Stendhal.
Thames and Hudson, 286 pp., £14.95, March 1995, 0 500 27832 6
Show More
‘Favoured Strangers’: Gertrude Stein and Her Family 
by Linda Wagner-Martin.
Rutgers, 346 pp., $34.95, August 1995, 0 8135 2169 6
Show More
Show More
... Alvin Langdon Coburn. Félix Vallotton, Francis Picabia, Jacques Lipschitz, Carl Van Vechten, Cecil Beaton. Francis Rose and Elie Nadelman. With Coburn, she is monumental, with Man Ray domestic, with Beaton wistful and, later, desolate. Stendhal’s intelligent introduction provides what for Stein critics has ...

Hard-Edged Chic

Rosemary Hill: The ‘shocking’ life of Schiap, 19 February 2004

Shocking! The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli 
by Dilys Blum.
Yale/Philadelphia Museum of Art, 320 pp., £45, November 2003, 0 300 10066 3
Show More
Show More
... object that came out of the work with Dalí was, suitably, a semi-accidental one: a photograph by Cecil Beaton of Wallis Simpson wearing a Dalí-Schiaparelli dress that she had chosen for her trousseau. In an attempt to soften her public image before her marriage, it was decided that Mrs Simpson should pose for Vogue. ...

Lady Rothermere’s Fan

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 7 November 1985

The Letters of Ann Fleming 
edited by Mark Amory.
Collins, 448 pp., £16.50, October 1985, 0 00 217059 0
Show More
Show More
... in Isaiah.’ ‘People born in all sorts of strata of society enjoyed the fruits of success,’ Cecil Beaton wrote apropos of the party she gave to mark Cyril Connolly’s 50th birthday. ‘And no one wasted their time in banalities.’ Not everyone – especially not her husbands – could handle so much brilliance, but there was always a chance that ...

More about Marilyn

Michael Church, 20 February 1986

Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe 
by Anthony Summers.
Gollancz, 414 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 575 03641 9
Show More
Norma Jeane: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe 
by Fred Lawrence Guiles.
Granada, 377 pp., £12.95, June 1985, 0 246 12307 9
Show More
Poor Little Rich Girl: The Life and Legend of Barbara Hutton 
by C. David Heymann.
Hutchinson, 390 pp., £12.95, March 1985, 0 09 146010 7
Show More
Deams that money can buy: The Tragic Life of Libby Holman 
by Jon Bradshaw.
Cape, 431 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 224 02846 4
Show More
All Those Tomorrows 
by Mai Zetterling.
Cape, 230 pp., £9.95, November 1985, 0 224 01841 8
Show More
Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady 
by Florence King.
Joseph, 278 pp., £8.95, August 1985, 0 7181 2611 4
Show More
Show More
... her he had consulted a priest before consenting to act with her turned the knife in a deep wound. Cecil Beaton saw Marilyn as ‘a dreaming somnambule, a composite of Alice in Wonderland, Trilby and a Minsky artist’. Barbara Hutton, with whom he often stayed at her Tangiers palace, seemed to him ‘a little Byzantine empress-doll’. What he saw behind ...

Misbehavin’

Susannah Clapp, 23 July 1987

A Life with Alan: The Diary of A.J.P. Taylor’s Wife, Eva, from 1978 to 1985 
by Eva Haraszti Taylor.
Hamish Hamilton, 250 pp., £14.95, June 1987, 0 241 12118 3
Show More
The Painted Banquet: My Life and Loves 
by Jocelyn Rickards.
Weidenfeld, 172 pp., £14.95, May 1987, 0 297 79119 2
Show More
The Beaverbrook Girl 
by Janet Aitken Kidd.
Collins, 240 pp., £12.95, May 1987, 0 00 217602 5
Show More
Show More
... new friend was the photographer Eric Deakin, who had just been sacked by Vogue for curtseying to Cecil Beaton at a Condé Nast party. Her first new lover was a ‘little professor’ with curly hair and ‘very grand’ friends. A.J. Ayer began their affair by taking her to lunch and encouraging her ‘to order artichaut vinaigrette because he wanted to ...

Flashes of 15 Denier

E.S. Turner, 20 March 1997

Forties Fashion and the New Look 
by Colin McDowell.
Bloomsbury, 192 pp., £20, February 1997, 0 7475 3032 7
Show More
Show More
... singularly well, especially in the recruiting advertisements. Incorrigible in war as in peace, Cecil Beaton shows us a svelte Digby Morton model appraising a well-bombed building, enabling Vogue to claim that ‘fashion is indestructible’ (a message more recently reinforced by universal pictures of designer jeans worn by an equally svelte model in a ...

What a Lot of Parties

Christopher Hitchens: Diana Mosley, 30 September 1999

Diana Mosley: A Biography 
by Jan Dalley.
Faber, 297 pp., £20, October 1997, 0 571 14448 9
Show More
Show More
... of bals nègres at Nancy Cunard’s. She kept a circle of gay male friends, from Gerald Berners to Cecil Beaton, at a time when homosexuals were being whacked to a pulp in German and Italian prisons. When occasion demanded, she could speak with conviction about the ‘old gang’ of politicians, and about the woes of the unemployed. But something else ...

The Fred Step

Anna Swan: Frederick Ashton, 19 February 1998

Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton 
by Julie Kavanagh.
Faber, 675 pp., £12.99, October 1997, 0 571 19062 6
Show More
Show More
... He began to cultivate influential people: Ashley Dukes (Rambert’s husband), the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant, Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia Lopokova, and, most important of all, the artist Sophie Fedorovitch, who, next to Fonteyn, became his closest collaborator. Many of his friends were living hand to mouth and survived only by ...

A life, surely?

Jenny Diski: To Portobello on Angel Dust, 18 February 1999

The Ossie Clark Diaries 
edited by Henrietta Rous.
Bloomsbury, 402 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7475 3901 4
Show More
Show More
... Ossie’s set, Lady H. explains included some of the most fascinating people of the era. Cecil Beaton entertained Ossie and Mick Jagger at his house ... Jagger invited Ossie to stay at Villefranche in the south of France. Ossie famously visited Tony Richardson’s La Garde Fresnais, where he behaved outrageously and threw a gaggle of ducks into ...

Can a rabbit talk to a cat?

Julian Barnes: Lartigue takes a leap, 7 April 2022

Lartigue: The Boy and the Belle Époque 
by Louise Baring.
Thames and Hudson, 192 pp., £28, April 2020, 978 0 500 02130 9
Show More
Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of Happiness 
by Denis Curti, Marion Perceval and Charles-Antoine Revol.
Marsilio, 208 pp., £40, July 2020, 978 88 297 0527 6
Show More
Show More
... dresses) standing on chairs at a racecourse – an image which half a century later inspired Cecil Beaton in his designs for My Fair Lady. Suspicious women, welcoming women, absurd women, beautiful women. And they would probably have been less surprised by the appearance of a camera than Lartigue makes out: numerous pre-paparazzi were also lurking ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences