BOOKS: Read this Summer

Chasing the Rose by Andrea di Robilant. 

Every other page exudes the fragrance of yet another rose, a most engaging and charming book. 

Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View of Hills.

A spider's web that emanates menace, quite masterful.

A Spy Among Friends - Ben MacIntyre.

This is a REAL holiday read! Riveting and incredible to us who are not in MI5 or MI6. 

MUSIC/DVD: September Song & September Affair

The end of summer, a melancholic month - September Song - comes to mind.

"Oh it's a long while from May to December.. Days grow short when you reach September" (composed by Kurt Weil, lyrics Maxwell Anderson) Check it out on YouTube from Billie Holliday, Bing Crosby, Neville Chevalier, & my favourite - Walter Huston. 

How about seeing the 1950's movie which fixed the romanticism of an Alexandrine youth. Only DVD version to be found in Spanish - never mind, Joan Fontaine's sly beauty & Joseph Cotton in 'September Affair' was worth watching after five decades. The roads devoid of traffic in Rome, Naples and Florence, so few cars and open carriages!  

Astonishing how sexy the film is without nudity, or overt bed scenes. 

Brush up on your Spanish! 

COMMENT/POETRY: Memorial and Poem by Hardy

An impressive memorial service at St. George's, Hanover Square for Bea Miller - the redoubtable editor of Vogue. 

It was well attended - rousing hymns as usual marred by someone behind singing too loudly & out of tune! 

Bea Miller was a friend and neighbour of mine in Dorset - I liked that one could say anything to her - she was intelligent and unshakeable. 

TRAVEL: Black Forest & Ulm

Cross-country from Salzburg to Baden Baden, with a stop at Ulm in the Black Forest at a hotel owned by the same family for four generations! Smiling service, delicious food, huge forests and vast green fields.

Karl Joseph Fuchs, 

Spielweg 61, 

79244 Münstertal/Schwarzwald, 

Germany.

www.spielweg.com 

COMMENT: Motor Yachts

As the summer progresses the number of motor yachts proliferate - so much for world financial wobbles - and they get uglier by the year.
The French call them 'des fers à repasser' - irons for pressing clothes. 

LIVING BY DESIGN: John Stefanidis Carnival

The Summer 2014 HIT are the Jungle Look shorts & T-Shirts for both men and women, designed by Konstantin Kakanias for Orlebar Brown - www.orlebarbrown.com

COMMENT: Paris Wedding

In May - a glorious wedding at Eglise Saint Thomas d'Aquin, Paris, just off Rue du Bac.
A-list fashionista Nura Khan married Louis Mosley. 
The best flowers I ever saw!

BOOKS: The Hotel on Place Vendrome

When you start 'The Hotel on Place Vendrome' it is enjoyable gossip, but it turns out to be a gripping, very well constructed and carefully researched account of Paris in World War II under German occupation, and it's Liberation - I defy you not to cry when reading this chapter.

<Hemingway very tiresome as the liberator of the Ritz!> 

Written by Tillar J. Mazzo - she sure has done her homework. 

(A few errors,  for example:  the Windsors were sent to govern the Bahamas, not Bermuda. Winston Churchill's son was Randolph not his brother. )

A very good read! 

CURIOSITY: Eleonora's Falcons

On the cliffs of Patmos there is a colony of Eleonora's Falcons (Falco Eleonorae), the most elegant of birds with a wingspan of 87-104cm. 

They go high, high, high and hover - suddenly swooping down over the cliffs - where they breed every summer. 

They winter in Madagascar & fly over the Sahara, the Equatorial forests, to Kenya and Mozambique, the total distance flown up to 9000km for a single one-way trip!