Friendships

Product Description

Mark Girouard has he claims scarcely ever thrown away a letter that he has received & here he selects & reproduces 29 of them ranging from his early childhood during the war to recent years & uses them to characterise & memorialise their authors who range from the grand the distinguished & the once or still famous to the entirely ordinary & from minor British gentry to Belgian monks from American businessmen to African street traders In the process a selective autobiography emerges as he discusses his relationship with this diverse crowd & at the same time he paints a riveting picture of Bohemian cultural life in post-war Britain & Ireland & the point of it all is that friendship has nothing at all to do with fame success or wealth but entirely with that sudden click of reciprocity or pleasure in companionship that makes life worth living So the reader can savour walks with John Betjeman through the ruins of blitzed London or with Denys Lasdun through the concrete dramas of the National Theatre; be regaled with stories about the Gorbals by Ruby Milton champion child dancer from Glasgow; eat disgusting rook pie off Bourbon gold plate with the Duke of Wellington; be touched by the surprising love life of Sir John Summerson loftiest of scholars; grieve at the decline of Mariga Guiness gifted drunken & loveable queen of the Irish Georgians; & hear how a Chelsea landlady modelled half-naked for the figure of Fame riding her chariot on top of the arch at Hyde Park Corner & myriad other life stories poignant moving & compelling in turn