{"product_id":"2026200015202-secondhand-cecil-beaton-the-authorised-biography","title":"Cecil Beaton: The Authorised Biography","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Fair\u003cbr\u003eJacket: Wear and tear with damage\u003cbr\u003ePages: Tanning and foxing\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFew figures in twentieth-century British culture burned as brightly — or as eccentrically — as Sir Cecil Beaton, the legendary photographer, diarist, and stage designer whose lens captured the defining faces of his age, from the luminous aristocracy of 1930s England to the Hollywood royalty of golden-era cinema. In Cecil Beaton: The Authorised Biography, Hugo Vickers constructs a sweeping and intimate portrait of a man who was simultaneously an outsider desperate for acceptance and an insider at the very heart of power, charting his rise from a middle-class Cambridge undergraduate to the confidant of queens, film stars, and cultural titans.\n\nVickers, drawing on unprecedented access to Beaton's personal diaries and private correspondence, presents a figure riddled with contradictions — vain yet generous, romantic yet calculating, endlessly creative yet consumed by social anxiety. The biography illuminates the full arc of a remarkable life with the authority of meticulous scholarship, while never sacrificing the narrative propulsion of a compelling life story. As much a chronicle of an era as it is of a man, this authorised account leaves the reader wondering whether Beaton's greatest work of art was, in fact, the carefully constructed persona of Cecil Beaton himself.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49203183354075,"sku":"2026200015202-SECONDHAND","price":15.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/66c19c22-fab7-4e30-a3fb-1fe34dd45e69.png?v=1788145081","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026200015202-secondhand-cecil-beaton-the-authorised-biography","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}