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At the V&A

Brian Dillon: Cecil Beaton, 5 April 2012

... In 1950 the great American fashion photographer Irving Penn wrote to Cecil Beaton, for whom he had recently sat, praising his ‘vague clairvoyance, the gentleness of not meeting the subject too head-on’. Beaton himself put it more vividly: ‘I coo like a bloody dove.’ It required a particular quality of cooing to coax from his royal clientele the florid, uptight, boring, outlandish and occasionally wonderful images in the V&A’s exhibition of his royal portraits (until 22 April ...

When I grow up

Hugo Williams, 23 October 1986

... suitcase. I’d certainly like to have a nervous tic so I can purse my lips up all the time like Cecil Beaton. Can I be completely bald, please? I love the smell of old pee. Why can’t I smell like that? When I grow up I want a thin piece of steel inserted into my penis for some reason. Nobody’s to tell me why it’s there. I want to guess! Tell ...

You could scream

Jenny Diski, 20 October 1994

Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me 
by Marlon Brando and Robert Lindsey.
Century, 468 pp., £17.99, September 1994, 0 7126 6012 7
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Greta & Cecil 
by Diana Souhami.
Cape, 272 pp., £18.99, September 1994, 0 224 03719 6
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... her public silence to the grave and Diana Souhami is not playing ghost to her shade. Greta and Cecil is not a biography of either Garbo or Beaton, but an account of their bizarre relationship, which, at its best, manages, improbably, to turn even the ineffably shallow ...

Walking like Swinburne

P.N. Furbank, 12 July 1990

Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant 
by Philip Hoare.
Hamish Hamilton, 463 pp., £20, June 1990, 0 241 12416 6
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... out. Then, for the pool of Narcissus, need we look further than the lens of his lifelong friend, Cecil Beaton? Their friendship, from its earliest days, positively throve on the camera, and Tennant’s tributes to his own camera image are so whole-hearted, so zestful, that one cannot help, sneakingly, admiring him for his nerve. ‘I’m nearly crazy at ...

A Resonance for William Styron

Gabriele Annan, 7 November 1985

Savage Grace 
by Natalie Robins and Steven Aronson.
Gollancz, 473 pp., £10.95, October 1985, 0 575 03738 5
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... contributed by themselves (if alive) like the entries in Who’s Who. There are some known names: Cecil Beaton, Jasper Johns, James Jones, John Mortimer, Patricia Neal, William Styron, Andy Warhol. Among the rest are antique dealers, decorators, magazine editors, a ‘freelance music co-ordinator for fashion shows’, a princess ‘internationally ...

At the National Portrait Gallery

Peter Campbell: On being photographed, 15 April 2004

... photographers use the control they have during a session to mark the image with their own style. Cecil Beaton, whose portrait photographs are on show at the National Portrait Gallery until 31 May, instead made images which show the style of his sitters – or at least find a suitable one for them. Beaton, who also ...

Kitty still pines for his dearest Dub

Andrew O’Hagan: Gossip, 6 February 2014

Becoming a Londoner: A Diary 
by David Plante.
Bloomsbury, 534 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 1 4088 3975 1
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The Animals: Love Letters between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy 
edited by Katherine Bucknell.
Chatto, 481 pp., £25, September 2013, 978 0 7011 8678 4
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... stared at me: as did the man in the white Stetson, who, when Connolly introduced me to him – Cecil Beaton – turned away with a frown of, who is this presumptuous young man? Well, I thought, I’ve made a fool of myself, and so there goes Cecil Beaton. Later in life, he sees that they are not his ...

At the Jeu de Paume

Brian Dillon: Peter Hujar, 19 December 2019

... masculinity. Hujar’s portrait Cockette John Rothermel in Fashion Pose, from 1971, has aspects of Cecil Beaton and Irving Penn – feathers, rouge and diamante – but it’s Rothermel’s haze of chest hair that really makes it. ‘I like people who dare,’ Hujar said.That’s not to say his portraits lack vulnerability. In September 1973 he ...

Hm, hm and that was all

Rosemary Hill: Queen Mary, 6 December 2018

The Quest for Queen Mary 
by James Pope-Hennessy, edited by Hugo Vickers.
Zuleika, 335 pp., £25, September 2018, 978 1 9997770 3 6
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... Catholic and literary family and was a friend of many of his most interesting contemporaries, Cecil Beaton and James Lees-Milne among them. He loved female company, was ‘much sought after by hostesses for his sparkling conversation’ and by 1953 had established a reputation as a biographer. Two volumes on the life of Richard Monckton-Milnes, the ...

This Charming Man

Frank Kermode, 24 February 1994

The Collected and Recollected Marc 
Fourth Estate, 51 pp., £25, November 1993, 1 85702 164 9Show More
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... of them here. Marc occasionally offers little emblematic hints on interpretation, a camera for Cecil Beaton, and, for Margaret Thatcher, a ‘No Milk Today’ tag hanging from her nipple. Bernard Levin, who alone appears twice in the book, is once parked under the bosom of Arianna Stassinopoulos. Marcia Falkender holds the PM, a ventriloquist’s ...

At the Imperial War Museum

Gaby Wood: Lee Miller, 17 December 2015

... the past on the photographic history of World War One, and on the war work of Miller’s nemesis Cecil Beaton. Roberts has assembled a collection to prove her contention that most of Miller’s subjects were women, and in doing so has admirably avoided the obvious. She doesn’t include the pictures of troops directing mortar fire or badly mangled ...

Garbo’s Secret

Brenda Maddox, 6 November 1980

Garbo 
by Alexander Walker.
Weidenfeld, 191 pp., £10, September 1980, 0 297 77799 8
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... a fag hag, comfortable with homosexuals, who were not going to jump her, and who made her laugh. Cecil Beaton proposed to her. Turning him down, she said: ‘You wouldn’t like to see me in the mornings in an old man’s pyjamas.’ He replied: ‘I would be wearing old man’s pyjamas too.’ She remained unpersuaded, unmarried, childless. The ...

At the Garden Museum

Rosemary Hill: Constance Spry, 9 September 2021

... arrangements that brought passers-by to a halt. Spry’s reputation was made. She worked with Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel and began to acquire her own celebrity clients. When Beaton photographed Wallis Simpson in 1937 wearing the notorious ‘lobster’ dress by Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí, she posed ...

Always the Same Dream

Ferdinand Mount: Princess Margaret, 4 January 2018

Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 423 pp., £16.99, September 2017, 978 0 00 820361 0
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... for the sharp English upper-class voice, you’d say she looks like a Maltese landlady.’ Cecil Beaton described her as vulgar and later as ‘a poor midgety brute’ who had ‘gone to pot … her complexion now a dirty negligee pink satin’. Only matched by Alan Clark’s diary entry: ‘fat, ugly, dwarflike, lecherous and revoltingly ...

Does one flare or cling?

Alice Spawls, 5 May 2016

‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
by Robin Muir.
National Portrait Gallery, 304 pp., £40, February 2016, 978 1 85514 561 0
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‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
National Portrait GalleryShow More
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... at Brogue seems to come alive. Settle let her photographers build sets and create dramas. Cecil Beaton, Todd’s greatest gift to Vogue, broke new ground, photographing three socialites en fête and en champagne: Baba Beaton, Wanda Baillie-Hamilton and Lady Bridget Poulett in a grotto of cellophane-wrapped ...

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