Cecil Beaton: Memoirs Of The 40's
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Few figures in twentieth-century culture possessed the singular eye and social access of Cecil Beaton — photographer to royalty, designer of legend, and intimate of the century's most dazzling personalities. Memoirs of the 40's chronicles his extraordinary decade with a diarist's precision and an artist's sensibility, transporting the reader through the glamour and devastation of wartime Britain, the corridors of power, and the glittering salons of Hollywood and high society. Beaton's accounts move from his celebrated wartime photography assignments for the British Ministry of Information — capturing the Blitz, the deserts of North Africa, and the Far East — to his encounters with icons such as Greta Garbo, Winston Churchill, and the Mountbattens, rendered with an intimacy that only a true insider could command. Written with wit, elegance, and an unerring eye for the telling detail, this memoir stands as a primary document of a world simultaneously being destroyed and reinvented. Beaton's prose mirrors his photographic genius — precise, composed, and luminous — illuminating how art and beauty endured, and indeed flourished, even amid global catastrophe. For devotees of cultural history, fashion, photography, and the lost world of mid-century British society, this volume presents an irresistible question: what does it mean to witness history not through the lens of a soldier, but through the lens of an aesthete?
Author: Cecil Beaton
Format: Hardback
Published: 1972, McGraw-Hill
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Few figures in twentieth-century culture possessed the singular eye and social access of Cecil Beaton — photographer to royalty, designer of legend, and intimate of the century's most dazzling personalities. Memoirs of the 40's chronicles his extraordinary decade with a diarist's precision and an artist's sensibility, transporting the reader through the glamour and devastation of wartime Britain, the corridors of power, and the glittering salons of Hollywood and high society. Beaton's accounts move from his celebrated wartime photography assignments for the British Ministry of Information — capturing the Blitz, the deserts of North Africa, and the Far East — to his encounters with icons such as Greta Garbo, Winston Churchill, and the Mountbattens, rendered with an intimacy that only a true insider could command. Written with wit, elegance, and an unerring eye for the telling detail, this memoir stands as a primary document of a world simultaneously being destroyed and reinvented. Beaton's prose mirrors his photographic genius — precise, composed, and luminous — illuminating how art and beauty endured, and indeed flourished, even amid global catastrophe. For devotees of cultural history, fashion, photography, and the lost world of mid-century British society, this volume presents an irresistible question: what does it mean to witness history not through the lens of a soldier, but through the lens of an aesthete?