Kirjahaku

A. E. Housman, romantic poet and classical scholar, is best-known as the author of A Shropshire Lad and the meticulous editor of Manilius, the Latin poet of astronomy.In this first full biography, Richard Perceval Graves convincingly reconciles the two apparently conflicting sides of Housman's personality, and reassesses the reputation of a man who was something of a mystery even to his closest friends.'This is bound to become the standard life.' John Carey, Sunday Times'Dispassionate and well-researched.' Philip Larkin, Guardian

When beautiful heiress Nicky Samuel (1951-2019) left school at the age of 16, she was caught up in the world of Sixties London. Her first job was with Yoko Ono, and she soon fell in love with the owner of the fashionable hippy boutique ‘Granny Takes a Trip’, Nigel Waymouth, whom she married and with whom she later attended the legendary Isle of Wight Pop Concert. She spent time with celebrities such as Andy Warhol, Jane Fonda, Roger Vadim, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, and Robert Mapplethorpe. At nineteen, Nicky became a fashionable hostess. She was photographed by Norman Parkinson for Vogue; and her close friends included Mick and Bianca Jagger, Christopher Gibbs, David Hockney, Anita Pallenberg and the eccentric, reclusive heroin addict John Paul Getty Jr. Her marriage broke up when she became involved in a passionate menage-a-trois involving the film-director Donald Cammell. In 1974, Nicky married homosexual jewellery designer, New York socialite and fortune-hunter Kenneth Jay Lane. Her social success was such that she was featured as a ‘New Beauty’ by Time Magazine. However, she became so unhappy and drug-addicted that she attempted suicide in the London Ritz. Nicky’s is exactly the kind of superficially glamorous life to which many star-struck and celebrity-hungry people aspire; this memoir is also a uniquely vivid experience of a vanished world.

This memoir is an account of a Georgian and Elizabethan childhood in mid-twentieth- century England. Vividly written and always honest, it depicts the incidents of the author’s life as seen through his eyes when he was a child. The result is always entertaining but, more important, based upon materials written and collected at the time, it provides a detailed account of what it was like to grow up in that distant world of the 1940s and 1950s. For those who lived through those post-war years, it will be a reminder of their earlier lives. For younger readers, it will give them an account of a vanished world so very different from the world of today: no television, no Internet, no mobile phones, and a largely white, largely Christian and highly deferential society. The author, Richard Perceval Graves, is a member of a distinguished literary family. His grandfather was the Irish Poet Alfred Perceval Graves of Father O’Flynn fame. His uncle was Robert Graves, the Poet and author of both I, Claudius and Goodbye to All That; and the memoir will have a special significance for all those interested in Robert, since it includes information that was excluded by Richard’s publishers from his biography. The principal locations in which it is set include Croydon, Brighton and its environs, Cranborne Chase in the heart of Wiltshire, Teignmouth in South Devon and above all Wokingham in Berkshire, where Richard’s father was Headmaster of Holme Grange School for twenty years.

Richard Graves is a biographer who has now turned the spotlight on his own life and times. Here, the personal experiences of the author are from a very different world, when there was no Internet, no smartphones, and no social media. He details the education, both religious and secular, that he received, and the isolated life that he led at boarding school. Here are described the seaside holidays he went on, the books, poems, newspapers and comics that he read, the wireless programmes and the songs to which he listened, and the television and films that he watched. Here too are such events as the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the Malayan Emergency, the Suez crisis, the Cyprus Emergency and, with the launch of Sputnik 1, mankind’s first steps into Space. We also glimpse the leading politicians and celebrities of the day such as Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Lady Docker and Marilyn Monroe. Here, in short, is a fascinating portrait of what it was like to live through those times of long-ago.