Nicky Haslam is the author of Folly de Grandeur: Romance and revival in an English country house.
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I’m never quite sure what the term ‘flappers’ means. How did these creatures flap, and why? Where did they flap? Did they flap all day, or only at night? Were theyin a flap, or being flapped, sad-flaps or flap-happy? Did they open flaps, or close them? Did they flap Jacks, or flip Jills, or both?
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In New York, in the 1960s, in a sleek, silvery elevator, I rose from the marble halls of Helena Rubinstein’s gleaming emporium up towards the top floor office of a new friend who worked for that legendary beautician. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the lift stopped, the doors slid open and a tiny, squat figure with oily, inky
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What is this I hold in my hands? Is it just a book? It’s quite heavy, but somehow, instinctively, one feels its light heart. When I eventually prize its even glossier inner core from its glossy padded outer shell, I still ask: what is this? It looks like a book, but its pages don’t shut
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Two women are the only heroes of this book. One is Princess Margaret, whom the author points out was far more instrumental in the early years of Colin Tennant’s ramshackle creation of Mustique than merely lending it her unparalleled presence. Quite apart from insisting, after Tennant had fallen out with a slew of architects, that
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One evening in 1923, Edward, Prince of Wales, pretty as paint in his white tie and a cutaway-coat, went to the theatre to see a new Gershwin musical. It was called Stop Flirting. Always one to ignore instructions, the Prince returned to enjoy this froth no less than nine times more. Obsessed by anything and
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By a fine coincidence, two legendary icons of British art were being feted in London on the same evening last month, and both are primarily famous, to the public at least, for their depiction of the Queen. At the National Portrait Gallery, the director Sandy Nairne hosted a dinner to celebrate the portrait oeuvre of
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It must be said that Patrick Lichfield — the outer man — wore his ego proudly and loudly on his sleeve. It must be said that Patrick Lichfield — the outer man — wore his ego proudly and loudly on his sleeve. And with his aristocratic yet trendy good looks, his Harrovian education, the brigade
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This is the ultimate ‘niche’ book. This is the ultimate ‘niche’ book. It focuses on that singular decade between the years of rockers and punks, when toffs, freed from school or army uniforms, and toughs, discarding skinhead aggression, found a sartorial meeting point. This new style, the cool child of late Fifties mods, had been
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This is an effervescent, elegantly written and faultlessly researched romp through the life and times of someone whose name in Britain was spoken with genuine fondness by an urbane few, with self-righteous anger by some and with disdain or fascination by almost everybody who can read — as, like it or not, very few people
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The embattled Prime Minister is not the only one being dogged by Blairite woes. I ran into his namesake Lionel, my friend of 50 years, in Sloane Square. He is still deeply upset about the theft of his beloved pooch, nabbed while his wife was walking in the park. Misty-eyed, he tells me that Debbie
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Judging by her own ideals of beauty and drama, Diana Dalziel’s arrival in the world must have been a bit of a let-down. That her Scottish father’s lineage merely went back to 834, or that her mother was part of the narrow 1890s New York society, was not half as picturesque as she’d have liked.