The Unexpurgated Beaton

The Unexpurgated Beaton

Author: Cecil Beaton

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9780786716593

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The personal journals of an official photographer to the British royal family and Academy Award-winning Hollywood and Broadway designer feature his observations of the worlds of fashion, society, and show business as well as his relationships with a host of famous figures and celebrities. Reprint.


Beaton in the Sixties

Beaton in the Sixties

Author: Cecil Beaton

Publisher: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson

Published: 2003-01-01

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 9780297645566

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The 1960s contains some of the very best set pieces, including Churchill's funeral. He has just completed making the film, My Fair Lady, which included rows with the director George Cukor, Rex Harrison's fondness for watching live sex, Cukor on Audrey Hepburn's figure etc. (Cecil was also the master at slicing up Hollywood social life at that period. He loathed it). His partner Kin, who has spent a year with him in England, returns to the USA, leaving Cecil to loneliness - but not for long. He is soon travelling aboard Cecile de Rothschild's yacht with Garbo - his former lover - as a fellow traveller. He visits Picasso at his home, the Rolling Stones in Marrakech; Andy Warhol in New York. Here is the young David Hockney, Peter Sellers being beastly, Paul Getty being mean. Cecil is fascinated by this new generation testing the boundaries as he and his friends had done in the 1920s. Friendships remain important - the Avons, Lady Juliet Duff, Lady Diana Cooper, Mrs Heinz. He also sees off all younger competition as photographer royal and as in the previous volume there are some very funny and often very pointed entries about the Queen, the Queen Mother, Princess Marina, Princess Marga


The Unexpurgated Beaton

The Unexpurgated Beaton

Author: Cecil Beaton

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0307429520

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Cecil Beaton was one of the great twentieth-century tastemakers. A photographer, artist, writer and designer for more than fifty years, he was at the center of the worlds of fashion, society, theater and film. The Unexpurgated Beaton brings together for the first time the never-before-published diaries from 1970 to 1980 and, unlike the six slim volumes of diaries published during his lifetime, these have been left uniquely unedited. Hugo Vickers, the executor of Beaton’s estate and the author of his acclaimed biography, has added extensive and fascinating notes that are as lively as the diary entries themselves. As one London reviewer wrote, “Vickers’ waspish footnotes are the salt on the side of the dish.” Beaton treated his other published diaries like his photographs, endlessly retouching them, but, for this volume, Vickers went back to the original manuscripts to find the unedited diaries. Here is the photographer for British and American Vogue, designer of the sets and costumes for the play and film My Fair Lady and the film Gigi, with a cast of characters from many worlds: Bianca Jagger, Greta Garbo, David Hockney, Truman Capote, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, Mae West, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich, Rose Kennedy and assorted Rothschilds, Phippses and Wrightsmans; in New York, San Francisco, Palm Beach, Rio and Greece, on the Amalfi coast; at shooting parties in the English countryside, on yachts, at garden parties at Buckingham Palace, at costume balls in Venice, Paris or London. Beaton had started as an outsider and “developed the power to observe, first with his nose pressed up against the glass,” and then later from within inner circles. Vickers has said, “his eagle eye missed nothing,” and his diaries are intuitive, malicious (he took a “relish in hating certain figures”), praising and awestruck. Truman Capote once said “the camera will never be invented that could capture or encompass all that he actually sees.” The Unexpurgated Beaton is a book that is not only a great read and wicked fun but a timeless chronicle of our age.


Cecil Beaton's Bright Young Things

Cecil Beaton's Bright Young Things

Author:

Publisher: National Portrait Gallery

Published: 2020-04-21

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9781855147720

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The stylish and extravagant world of the "Bright Young Things" of 1920s and '30s London, seen through the eye of renowned British photographer Cecil Beaton In 1920s and '30s Britain, Cecil Beaton used his camera and his larger-than-life personality to mingle with that flamboyant and rebellious group of artists, writers, socialites and partygoers who became known as the "Bright Young Things." Famously fictionalized by the likes of Evelyn Waugh (in Vile Bodies), Anthony Powell and Henry Green, these men and women cut a dramatic swathe through the epoch and embodied its roaring spirit. In a series of themed chapters, covering Beaton's first self-portraits and earliest sitters to his time at Cambridge and as principle society photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, over 50 leading figures who sat for Beaton are profiled and the dazzling parties, pageants and balls of the period are brought to life. Among this glittering cast are Beaton's socialite sisters Baba and Nancy Beaton, Stephen Tennant, Siegfried Sassoon, Evelyn Waugh and Daphne du Maurier. Beaton's photographs are complemented by a wide range of letters, drawings, book jackets and ephemera, and contextualised by artworks created by those in his circle, including Christopher Wood, Rex Whistler and Henry Lamb. Cecil Beaton (1904-80) is one of the most celebrated British portrait photographers of the 20th century and is renowned for his images of elegance, glamour and style. Beaton quickly developed a reputation for his striking and fantastic photographs, which culminated in his portraits of Queen Elizabeth in 1939. Also well known as a diarist, Beaton became a society fixture in his own right. His influence on portrait photography was profound and lives on today in the work of many contemporary photographers.


Cecil Beaton

Cecil Beaton

Author: Hugo Vickers

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2020-03-05

Total Pages: 688

ISBN-13: 1529316251

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Cecil Beaton was one of Britain's greatest cultural icons - not just as a photographer capturing some of the most celebrated portraits of the 20th century but also as designer of the iconic sets and costumes for the films My Fair Lady and Gigi. In 1980, Beaton personally chose Hugo Vickers to be his biographer, entrusting him with his diaries and the entire body of letters he had written - both personally and professionally - over the course of his life. Drawing on five years of intensive research and interviews with the likes of Audrey Hepburn, Truman Capote, Princess Grace of Monaco and Sir John Gielgud, Vickers' biography was an instant bestseller upon its publication in 1985. Exploring Beaton's metamorphosis from being the child of a staid middle-class family to an international figure mingling with the glittering stars of his age, the biography also details his great love for Greta Garbo and reveals his private sense of failure that the success he always wanted - as a playwright - eluded him. Republished in a new paperback edition in time for Bright Young Things, a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2020, Cecil Beaton is the definitive and authorised biography of one of the world's most fascinating, famous and admired photographers.


The Duff Cooper Diaries

The Duff Cooper Diaries

Author: John Julius Norwich

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Published: 2014-03-20

Total Pages: 780

ISBN-13: 1780227507

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The long awaited and highly revealing diaries of the politician, diplomat, and socialite (married to Lady Diana Cooper) 'This is a fabulous, jaw-dropping read' SUNDAY TIMES 'Duff Cooper was as close to the action as anyone during the dramatic events of the mid-20th century. He was also comically priapic, committing enough sexual indiscretions to fill a dozen diaries' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Fascinating for two things: their testament to an exhilarating century and their witness to a vanished age of power and privilege ... What a man' OBSERVER Duff Cooper was a first-rate witness of just about every significant event from 1914 to 1950. His diary includes some magnificent set pieces - as a young soldier at the end of WWI, as a politician during the General Strike of 1926, as King Edward VIII's friend at the time of the Abdication, and from Paris after the liberation in 1944, when he became British ambassador. If Duff Cooper's name has dimmed in the 50 years since his death, publication of these diaries will bring him to the fore once again. His family have long resisted publication - indeed Duff Cooper's nephew, the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis, was so shocked by the sexual revelations that he suggested to John Julius Norwich that it might be best for all concerned if they were burnt. Now, superbly edited by John Julius Norwich, who familial link ensures all kinds of additional information as footnotes, these diaries join the ranks.


Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 3): 1943-57

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 3): 1943-57

Author: Chips Channon

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2022-09-08

Total Pages: 1201

ISBN-13: 1529151740

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The third and final volume of the remarkable Sunday Times bestselling diaries of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon ___________________________________________ 'An utterly addictive glimpse of London high society and politics in the 40s and 50s.' Robert Harris 'An instant classic . . . quite simply the greatest social and political diaries of the 20th century.' Daily Telegraph 'Rich, exuberant, copious and shatteringly honest.' Spectator 'A scurrilous read. Fascinating. Gripping!' Alan Titchmarsh 'Chips writes with such vividness that one feels one is living each day in his exalted company.' The Oldie _______________________________________ This final volume of the unexpurgated diaries of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon begins as the Second World War is turning in the Allies' favour. It ends with Chips descending into poor health but still able to turn a pointed phrase about the political events that swirl around him and the great and the good with whom he mingles. Throughout these final fourteen years Chips assiduously describes events in and around Westminster, gossiping about individual MPs' ambitions and indiscretions, but also rising powerfully to the occasion to capture the mood of the House on VE Day or the ceremony of George VI's funeral. His energies, though, are increasingly absorbed by a private life that at times reaches Byzantine levels of complexity. We encounter the London of the theatre and the cinema, peopled by such figures as John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Douglas Fairbanks Jr, as well as a seemingly endless grand parties at which Chips might well rub shoulders with Cecil Beaton, the Mountbattens, or any number of dethroned European monarchs. He has been described as 'The greatest British diarist of the 20th century'. This final volume fully justifies that accolade.


Malice in Wonderland

Malice in Wonderland

Author: Hugo Vickers

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-10-05

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1643138448

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The witty and perceptive diaries kept by Cecil Beaton's authorized biographer during his many fascinating encounters with extraordinary—often legendary—characters in his search for the real Cecil Beaton. Hugo Vickers's life took a dramatic turn in 1979 when the legendary Sir Cecil Beaton invited him to be his authorised biographer. The excitement of working with the famous photographer was dashed only days later when Cecil Beaton died. But the journey had begun - Vickers was entrusted with Beaton's papers, diaries and, most importantly, access to his friends and contemporaries. In Malice in Wonderland, Vickers shares excerpts from his personal diaries kept during this period. For five years, Vickers travelled the world and talked to some of the most fascinating and important social and cultural figures of the time, including royalty such as the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, film stars such as Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews, writers such as Truman Capote, and photographers such as Irving Penn and Horst. And not only Beaton's friends - Vickers sought out the enemies too, notably Irene Selznick. He was taken under the wings of Lady Diana Cooper, Clarissa Avon and Diana Vreeland. Drawn into Beaton's world and accepted by its members, Vickers the emerging biographer also began his own personal adventure. The outsider became the insider - Beaton's friends became his friends. Malice in Wonderland is a fascinating portrait of a now disappeared world, and vividly and sensitively portrays some of its most fascinating characters as we travel with Vickers on his quest.


Cecil Beaton

Cecil Beaton

Author: Giles Huxley-parlour

Publisher: Chris Beetles Limited

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 90

ISBN-13: 9781905738137

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Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) was essential to the cultural life of Britain and beyond in the twentieth