Five Love Affairs and a Friendship: The Paris Life of Nancy Cunard, Icon of the Jazz Age

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Description

Born in March 1896, Nancy Cunard was a great beauty, rich, promiscuous, with a mesmeric effect on men. She was also highly intelligent, reading widely and writing poetry.

Of Nancy's many affairs the five included in this book are the ones with the American poet Ezra Pound, the novelists Aldous Huxley and Michael Arlen (who characterised her as Iris Storm in his best-selling novel The Green Hat), Louis Aragon (the real founder of the Surrealist movement) and finally and controversially the black American pianist Henry Crowder, with whom she ran her printing press in Paris. The lifelong friendship was with George Moore, her mother's lover, one of the most acclaimed novelists at the time of her childhood. His death in 1933 marks the end of this tempestuous tale of passion and intrigue.

Reviews

Riveting ... As de Courcy says in her enjoyable, deftly written book, it is hard to find a label for this remarkable woman. Selfish lover, alcoholic, campaigner - they all fit -- Jane Ridley * THE SPECTATOR *
Highly readable -- Ysenda Maxtone Graham * DAILY MAIL *
De Courcy brilliantly recreates the heady spirit of Cunard's Paris: Montparnasse, the Lindbergh flight, Shakespeare & Co, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, and the Missouri-born dancer Josephine Baker, who performed naked save for a flamingo feather ... De Courcy, a biographer of Diana Mosley and Margot Asquith and the author of Chanel's Riviera is an expert guide to this world. You feel she really might have been there at the cafs, bars and botes -- Laura Freeman * THE TIMES *
A racily enjoyable book . . . As the venerable author of studies of Diana Mosley, Margot Asquith and Coco Chanel, de Courcy commands this historical field and fills what is at bottom a tragic story of self-centred and self-destructive behaviour with a wealth of amusing anecdote and salacious detail -- Rupert Christiansen * DAILY TELEGRAPH *
A seductive portrait of life lived to the fullest * PUBLISHERS WEEKLY *
A fulsome portrait of a quixotic, disruptive, talented woman * KIRKUS *
This bed-hopping biography by de Courcy does an excellent job conveying the reckless, decadent Jazz Age in Paris * LIBRARY JOURNAL *

Author Bio

Anne de Courcy is the author of thirteen widely acclaimed works of social history and biography, including THE HUSBAND HUNTERS, THE FISHING FLEET, THE VICEROY'S DAUGHTERS and DEBS AT WAR. In the 1970s she was Woman's Editor on the LONDON EVENING NEWS and in the 1980s she was a regular feature-writer for the EVENING STANDARD. She is also a former features writer and reviewer for the DAILY MAIL. She lives in London SW3.