Anne De Courcy Books

Anne de Courcy explores the controversial life of Nancy Cunard, a legendary beauty and writer, during her thirteen years in Jazz-Age Paris. The 1920s in Paris was a vibrant hub of artistic talent, free from censorship, where life and love flourished. At the center of this cultural explosion was the alluring English socialite Nancy Cunard, heir to a famous shipping fortune. Her romantic entanglements were numerous, but the narrative highlights five significant relationships, including passionate affairs with writers Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen, and Louis Aragon, alongside her romance with jazz pianist Henry Crowder. A lifelong friendship with Irish novelist George Moore, rumored to be her father, also played a crucial role in her life. Despite her wealth, Nancy experienced emotional deprivation, with her mother, Lady Cunard, becoming a prominent London hostess. From a young age, Nancy gravitated towards promiscuity and heavy drinking, favoring the arts over her privileged social sphere. An intelligent poet and founder of a small press that published Samuel Beckett, she was a muse to many and a fierce advocate against racism and fascism. Leaving Paris in 1933, she continued to embrace a daring lifestyle until her death in 1965. This work presents a nuanced portrait of a complex woman against the backdrop of a pivotal decade in the City of Light.

From the author of the critically acclaimed THE VICEROY'S DAUGHTERS, the story of a glittering aristocrat who was also at the heart of political society in the interwar years.

An extraordinary account - from firsthand sources - of upper class women and the active part they took in the War

Diana Mosley is the riveting tell-all biography of one of the most intriguing, enigmatic and controversial women of the twentieth century, written with her exclusive cooperation and based upon hundreds of hours of taped interviews and unprecedented access to her private papers, letters and diaries. Lady Mosley's only stipulation was that the book not be published until after her death. Society darling Diana Mosley, born June 10, 1910, was by general consent the most beautiful and the cleverest of the six Mitford sisters. She was eighteen when she married Bryan Guinness, of the brewing dynasty, with whom she had two sons. After four years, she left him for the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley, an admirer of Mussolini and a notorious womanizer. It was a course of action that horrified her family and scandalized society. In 1933 Diana took her sister Unity to Germany, where both met the new German leader, Adolf Hitler. Diana became so close to him that when she and Mosley married in 1936, the ceremony took place in the Goebbels' drawing room with Hitler as the guest of honor. She would continue to visit Hitler until a month before the outbreak of World War II, and afterwards she refused to believe in the horrors of the Holocaust. During the war the Mosleys' association with Hitler led them to be arrested and detained for three and a half years. After, they rebuilt their lives in exile, entertaining and being entertained by pre-war friends and new associates, including the Windsors. Attempts by Oswald Mosley to enter mainstream politics failed abjectly; for him at least, the message of the real world finally got through. His death devastated Diana, after their almost fifty years together. Her loyalty to him remained unquestioning, his political beliefs as sacred in death as in life. Anne de Courcy's gripping biography reveals the mesmerizing life of a woman whose fateful choices shocked her family, friends and fellow countrymen while she remained unbowed. This is a unique window on a world and a life that are no more but are still gripping fifty years later.

An unconventional view of the First World War from inside the glittering social salon of Downing Street: a story of unrequited love, loss, sacrifice, scandal and the Prime Minister's wife, Margot Asquith

Bestselling social historian Anne de Courcy reveals the glamour and grit of the Second World War on the French Riviera

A wonderful portrait of British upper-class life in the Season of 1939 - the last before the Second World War.

Scenes from the turbulent life of the rich, glamorous and beautiful Nancy Cunard

Irene (born 1896), Cynthia (b.1898) and Alexandria (b.1904) were the three daughters of Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India 1898-1905.The three sisters were at the very heart of the fast and glittering world of the Twenties and Thirties. Irene had love affairs in the glamorous Melton Mowbray hunting set. Cynthia ('Cimmie') married Oswald Mosley, joining him first in the Labour Party before following him into fascism. Alexandra ('Baba'), the youngest and most beautiful, married the Prince of Wales's best friend Fruity Metcalfe. On Cimmie's early death in 1933 Baba flung herself into a long and passionate affair with Mosley and a liaison with Mussolini's ambassador to London, Count Dino Grandi, while enjoying the romantic devotion of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. The war finds them based at 'the Dorch' (the Dorchester Hotel) doing good works. At the end of their extraordinary lives, Irene and Baba have become, rather improbably, pillars of the establishment, Irene being made one of the very first Life Peers in 1958 for her work with youth clubs.

Reichtum, Weltpolitik, Genie, Macht, Lebenshunger und Stil: An der französischen Riviera der 30er Jahre vereinen sie sich. Glamouröser Mittelpunkt ist Gabrielle Chanel, ursprünglich aus ärmsten Verhältnissen stammend. Ihre Zielstrebigkeit hat sie reich und berühmt gemacht, in ihrem Landhaus La Pausa empfängt sie Politiker wie Winston Churchill, Schriftsteller wie Bertolt Brecht, Filmmagnaten, Maharadschas, Prinzen, Künstler, Stars. Und alle feiern sich und das Leben. Für den 1. September 1939 ist die Eröffnung der ersten Filmfestspiele von Cannes angesetzt; Marlene Dietrich ist extra mit Ehemann und Liebhaber angereist. Doch dann marschiert die deutsche Wehrmacht in Polen ein. Selbst den vergnügungssüchtigsten Sommergästen wird klar, was das bedeutet. Und nach Jahrzehnten des Triumphes wird Gabrielle Chanel plötzlich nicht mehr die allerrühmlichste Rolle in der Geschichte spielen. . . Auch wenn die Daten, Schauplätze und Begegnungen sorgfältig recherchiert und belegt sind, ist Coco Chanels Riviera so anekdotenreich erzählt, werden die Schicksale so raffiniert miteinander verknüpft, dass man das Buch wie einen spannenden Gesellschaftsroman liest, der noch einmal die Höhepunkte einer Ära beschwört, ehe es zur Katastrophe kommt.