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The Perfect Summer Audiobook by Juliet Nicolson
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Title: The Perfect Summer
Author: Juliet Nicolson
Narrator: Beth Chalmers
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
Language: English
Release date: 04-19-12
Publisher: John Murray
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
One summer of nearly a hundred years ago saw one of the high sunlit meadows of English history. A new king was crowned; audiences swarmed to Covent Garden to see the Ballet Russes and Nijinskys gravity-defying leaps. The aristocracy was at play, bounding from house party to the next; the socialite Lady Michelham travelled with her nineteen yards of pearls. Rupert Brooke (a 23-year-old poet in love with love, Keats, marrons glaces and truth) swam in the river at Grantchester. But perfection was over-reaching itself. The rumble of thunder from the summer's storms presaged not only the bloody war years ahead: the country was brought to near standstill by industrial strikes, and unrest exposed the chasm between privileged and poor; as if the heat was torturing those imprisoned in society's straitjacket and stifled by the city smog.
Children, seeking relief from the scorching sun, drowned in village ponds. What the protagonists could not have known is that they were playing out the backdrop to WWI; in a few years time the world, let alone England, would never be the same again. Through the eyes of a series of exceptional individuals; a debutante, a suffragette, a politician, a trade unionist, a butler and the Queen; Juliet Nicolson illuminates a turning point in history. With the gifts of a great storyteller she rekindles a vision of a time when the sun shone but its shadows fell on all.
Members Reviews:
Interesting but....
The author spends a great deal of her book admiring Diana Manners Cooper..."The most beautiful woman in England in 1911" which became quite tiresome. The antics she describes of the exceedingly immoral upper class sounds rather like our own time except it is now hardly confined to the wealthy and titled. The misery and privations of the poor are detailed and make understandable the push toward socialism, failure though it has proved. The writing is excellent, if somewhat repetitious...but then she covers such a lot of territory in a rapidly changing world.
When the temperature was rising
In this book and her later THE GREAT SILENCE Juliet Nicholson brings about a return to the grand social-historical narratives written by scholars and historians of half a decade ago; this book hearkens back to the similar kinds of equally readable and fascinating books by Samuel Hynes, Rupert Croft-Cooke, Leon Edel and James (now Jan) Morris from the 60s, 70s and 80s. The "perfect summer" here is 1911, when the British crown their new king and queen, George and Mary at Westminster Abbey, and when the general transport strikers initiated their great strike; the summer was also the apex of Edwardian glamor, with great costume balls held which were reigned over by the great debutante of the season, Lady Diana Manners. As in THE GREAT SILENCE Nicholson works this narrative as a series of interlocking microbiographies, focusing on characters as diverse as Queen Mary (here not yet the severe and greedy gargoyle she was to become, but a loving mother and wife and intensely shy woman); Elinor Glyn (madly in love with Lord Curzon); the Marchioness of Ripon (the woman to bring the Ballet Russes to London that year for the first time); the great Bohemian painter Augustus John; the butler Eric Horne (who would later become the author of the bestselling tell-all memoir WHAT THE BUTLER WINKED AT); and many more.
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Title: The Perfect Summer
Author: Juliet Nicolson
Narrator: Beth Chalmers
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
Language: English
Release date: 04-19-12
Publisher: John Murray
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
One summer of nearly a hundred years ago saw one of the high sunlit meadows of English history. A new king was crowned; audiences swarmed to Covent Garden to see the Ballet Russes and Nijinskys gravity-defying leaps. The aristocracy was at play, bounding from house party to the next; the socialite Lady Michelham travelled with her nineteen yards of pearls. Rupert Brooke (a 23-year-old poet in love with love, Keats, marrons glaces and truth) swam in the river at Grantchester. But perfection was over-reaching itself. The rumble of thunder from the summer's storms presaged not only the bloody war years ahead: the country was brought to near standstill by industrial strikes, and unrest exposed the chasm between privileged and poor; as if the heat was torturing those imprisoned in society's straitjacket and stifled by the city smog.
Children, seeking relief from the scorching sun, drowned in village ponds. What the protagonists could not have known is that they were playing out the backdrop to WWI; in a few years time the world, let alone England, would never be the same again. Through the eyes of a series of exceptional individuals; a debutante, a suffragette, a politician, a trade unionist, a butler and the Queen; Juliet Nicolson illuminates a turning point in history. With the gifts of a great storyteller she rekindles a vision of a time when the sun shone but its shadows fell on all.
Members Reviews:
Interesting but....
The author spends a great deal of her book admiring Diana Manners Cooper..."The most beautiful woman in England in 1911" which became quite tiresome. The antics she describes of the exceedingly immoral upper class sounds rather like our own time except it is now hardly confined to the wealthy and titled. The misery and privations of the poor are detailed and make understandable the push toward socialism, failure though it has proved. The writing is excellent, if somewhat repetitious...but then she covers such a lot of territory in a rapidly changing world.
When the temperature was rising
In this book and her later THE GREAT SILENCE Juliet Nicholson brings about a return to the grand social-historical narratives written by scholars and historians of half a decade ago; this book hearkens back to the similar kinds of equally readable and fascinating books by Samuel Hynes, Rupert Croft-Cooke, Leon Edel and James (now Jan) Morris from the 60s, 70s and 80s. The "perfect summer" here is 1911, when the British crown their new king and queen, George and Mary at Westminster Abbey, and when the general transport strikers initiated their great strike; the summer was also the apex of Edwardian glamor, with great costume balls held which were reigned over by the great debutante of the season, Lady Diana Manners. As in THE GREAT SILENCE Nicholson works this narrative as a series of interlocking microbiographies, focusing on characters as diverse as Queen Mary (here not yet the severe and greedy gargoyle she was to become, but a loving mother and wife and intensely shy woman); Elinor Glyn (madly in love with Lord Curzon); the Marchioness of Ripon (the woman to bring the Ballet Russes to London that year for the first time); the great Bohemian painter Augustus John; the butler Eric Horne (who would later become the author of the bestselling tell-all memoir WHAT THE BUTLER WINKED AT); and many more.