Reviews
Book Reviews
The psychotherapist Julia Samuel, née Guinness, comes from a family of “great privilege and multiple traumas”, she confesses in the introduction to her latest book, Every Family Has a Story. “There were so many secrets and so much left unsaid,” she writes of the Anglo-Irish banking dynasty.
The cover of Justine Picardie’s biography Miss Dior depicts a swan-necked model in a ruffled gown, a publicity shot for the perfume that Christian Dior named after his younger sister in 1947.
On page 100 a very different image of the original Miss Dior emerges. Catherine Dior, who joined the French Resistance in 1941, describes being tortured in 1944 by her fellow countrymen at the behest of the Nazis. “They undressed me, bound my hands and plunged me into the water.” Although it was July, the bathwater was freezing — her interrogators ensured they had sufficient ice for both summer cocktails and inflicting pain.
If lockdown has given you aspirations of literary grandeur, beware — a life of penury awaits. Chris Paling’s A Very Nice Rejection Letter is an unexpurgated insight into the battle to become published. What’s more, the financial details are not pretty. An incumbent of Grub Street since the 1980s, Paling spent years pitching novels and film scripts in a profession he admits is “perpetually in crisis, overburdened by vanity and under-served by talent”. His self-deprecating musings are divided into three diaries, with the reader arriving in his life in April 2007 to be told: “Writing income for the year . . . minus £300.”
When Simon Garfield’s labrador was barred from a Discover Dogs exhibition in east London — family pets were not allowed — he did what any indulgent dog lover would do. He treated 12-year-old Ludo to a dog-friendly cinema screening of Rocketman, where the elderly dog “had his own seat next to mine, with a blanket and ‘pupcorn’ treats”. The lights were kept brighter during the film “so as not to distress” the canine customers.