I’m at the Ritz in Paris with Tilly and Cornelia. We’re here for the final fittings of Tilly’s wedding dress. It’s July, and Paris is sweltering, humid and close, the kind of heat that makes me regret coming at all. Every time I step outside, I feel coated in the city’s ever-present soot, sticky andContinue reading “Chapter 54: My Baby Left Me”
Category Archives: Aesthetics
Debbie Reynolds
Essay · Film & Lives The Girl Who Outlasted Everything Debbie Reynolds was not the most critically celebrated actress of her generation, nor the most artistically adventurous, nor the one the serious film culture tended to reach for when it needed an example of Hollywood at its best. She was something rarer and in someContinue reading “Debbie Reynolds”
Chapter 53: “Veritatem Dilexi” – Commencement
The results are back for our exams and our theses.Tilly: summa cum laude. Me: magna cum laude. Tilly says it’s only because I’ve been busy with boys that I didn’t graduate summa like she did. “You’ve been juggling two of the country’s most eligible bachelors, from opposite ends of the social strata. That’s quite aContinue reading “Chapter 53: “Veritatem Dilexi” – Commencement”
Albert King
Essay · Music & Lives The Velvet Bulldozer Albert King was six feet four inches tall and played a right-handed guitar upside down and left-handed, without a pick, bending strings that were already fighting him — strung the wrong way, the tension reversed, producing a sound so specific and so irreducible that no one whoContinue reading “Albert King”
Design Mood Board
Fashion Mood Board
Chapter 52: I Need Somebody to Lean On
Mrs Montgomery is with Topper when he picks me up from Idlewild. She embraces me, calls me “darling daughter,” and is far more polite than she has ever been. I send Topper a questioning look; he just shakes his head and moves to guide his mother into the front seat, only for her to chirpContinue reading “Chapter 52: I Need Somebody to Lean On “
The Human Condition According to Dante
By Bergotte No work of literature begins more universally than the Divine Comedy. Not with a king or a war or a cosmogony, but with a man — any man, every man — who has lost his way in the middle of his life. Dante Alighieri wrote the greatest poem of the Middle Ages andContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Dante”
Chapter 51: Today, Tomorrow and Forever
Mabel and I are at The Peabody, making sure everything is in order for her upcoming nuptials. Mabel is disappointed that Topper isn’t coming. “How rude of him,” she exclaims. I shrug. “You have to bring someone,” she insists. “I’ve put you two down.” I sigh. “But I told you it would just be meContinue reading “Chapter 51: Today, Tomorrow and Forever”
Frank Bowling
Essay · Art & Lives The Painter Who Crossed Every Ocean Frank Bowling arrived in London from British Guiana in 1953 with no art education and a desire to be a poet, and became, across the following seven decades, one of the most significant painters working in the English language — a phrase that wouldContinue reading “Frank Bowling”
My World of Interiors 