Author: My World of Interiors
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Chapter 22: You May Go to College – You May Go to School
“We’ll come off too pedestrian if we stay in college housing,” Tilly informs me. “We’re adults. We need our freedom now.” I agree, if only to keep the peace. It’s the first term at Bryn Mawr, autumn after our debut into New York society, a debut none of us took seriously, which upset Tilly’s mother.…
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Alan Parker and the Brutal Energy of Modern British Cinema
Alan Parker belongs to that increasingly rare category of British director whose work was at once popular, ambitious and unmistakably personal. He was not a miniaturist, nor a specialist, nor a filmmaker content to remain within one tonal register. He moved restlessly between genres and scales: from the stylised bravado of Bugsy Malone to the…
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Chapter 21: My Happiness
I rush over to the boy’s new apartment on Alabama, they’ve moved again, as soon as I’m back for the summer of ’53. The boy isn’t home yet, but would I like to wait? He won’t be long.His mother brings me a cup of coffee, and sits with me at the kitchen table. “Did you…
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Where the River Bends: Memphis and the Music That Changed the World
It is the most productive square mile in American cultural history. A city of grief and genius, of violence and transcendence, built on cotton and the blues and the unsettled accounts of race — Memphis made the modern world’s soundtrack and has never quite recovered from the effort. By Bergotte Begin with the geography, because…
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Chapter 20: Till I Waltz Again with You
Gene Tierney is visiting the school. She used to go here. It’s a fancy school. One of Cary Grant’s wives, the one related to Tilly, is an alumna. All the Bouvier Beales, too. Lee was here until last year. She’s Jackie’s sister.I didn’t like Lee much, I can’t quite put my finger on why, just…
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Ivor Novello and the Lost Language of British Glamour
Ivor Novello has survived in British culture in a peculiarly ghostly form. His name remains everywhere, attached to one of the country’s most prestigious songwriting honours, and yet the man himself has drifted into soft focus. Many know the Ivor Novello Awards. Far fewer could say with confidence who Novello was, what he made, or…
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Chapter 19: Young and Beautiful
“I feel like I’ve outgrown high school,” Tilly pouts at her reflection in the mirror. “I can’t believe we still have two more years.”Cornelia and I roll our eyes.“Honey,” Cornelia says, “you’re sixteen, five foot nine, and a hundred and fifty-five pounds, you have not outgrown high school.”“I just feel like I want to be…
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The Little Man in the Big House: Hercule Poirot and the Strangeness of England
Agatha Christie gave the world’s most famous detective a moustache, a foreign accent, and a profound dislike of the English countryside. It was, in every sense, the point. By Bergotte There is a village in the English imagination that has never quite existed and has never stopped existing. It has a church with a Norman…
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Chapter 18: Wild at Heart
“I have my driver’s licence!” I suddenly remember as we are watching The Ed Sullivan Show, we haven’t even talked about it yet. He shrugs. “Well, I’ve had mine for ages. What’s so special about yours?” He turns to me, and I grin. “I can get a car and drive us around,” I tell him.…
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The Education of Helplessness: Of Human Bondage and the Novel That Refused to Lie
Somerset Maugham called it the book that saved his life. He also said it was the worst kind of novel — an autobiographical one. He was right on both counts, which is precisely why it endures. By Bergotte There is a type of novel that functions less like a work of art than like a…
