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28 May 2022 THE WEEKARTS
Nancy Cunard was “the embodiment of the
poor little rich girl”, said Rupert Christiansen
in The Daily Telegraph. The only child of
wealthy but neglectful parents – her English
father was a scion of the Cunard shipping
line, her mother a Bostonian heiress – she
became famous in the Roaring Twenties
for her bewitching good looks, and for her
“boozing and bedhopping”. There was
“plenty that was good and clever inside” her;
but she was also violent and self-destructive, and in older age she
suffered a “ghastly decline”. Her “roller-coaster life” has inspired
several biographies, including “outstanding” ones by Anne
Chisholm and Lois Gordon. What makes Anne de Courcy’s
distinctive is that it focuses on the 1920s and early 1930s, when
Cunard was based in Paris and was the “toast of bohemian
Montparnasse”. Packed with “amusing anecdote and salacious
detail”, this is a “racily enjoyable book”.
In 1920, when she was 24, Cunard had been obliged to have a
hysterectomy, as a result of complications from a previous surgery,
said Jane Ridley in The Spectator. “Far from
ruining her life”, it “proved a liberation”,
enabling her to satisfy her “seemingly
insatiable appetitive for sex” without fear
of pregnancy. Of the scores of men she had
affairs with in the 1920s, De Courcy focuses
on five – the most famous of whom were
Ezra Pound and Aldous Huxley (having sex
with the latter, said Cunard, was “like having
slugs crawl all over you”). The “friend ship”
of the book’s title was with the Irish novelist
and poet George Moore, a lover of Cunard’s
mother who in turn became Nancy’s
“faithful friend”.
The final affair described in this book was
with the black American jazz pianist Henry
Crowder, said Laura Freeman in The Times.
Cunard regularly struck him with her
“armfuls of ivory bangles”; once, when asked
what had caused the bruising on his face, he
replied: “Just braceletwork.” Yet it proved the most enduring of
her relationships, and it also helped awaken her politically: she
became a tireless campaigner for African-American rights, and in
1934 she published Negro, a groundbreaking anthology of black
literature and art. It is a bit odd that De Courcy chose to frame
Cunard’s life through her sexual relationships, said Lucy Moore
in Literary Review. After all, friendship “meant so much more to
her” – even those friendships that began with sex. For the most
part, however, this is an enjoyably atmospheric work, which
superbly conveys the “louche glamour” of Paris in the Jazz Age.Five Love Affairs and
a Friendship
by Anne de Courcy
W&N 336pp £22
The Week Bookshop £17.99Review of reviews: Books
Book of the week
Written by Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper,
Chums is a “short, sharp and often disturbing
examination of how our current politics was first
played out at Oxford half a lifetime ago”, said Tim
Adams in The Observer. It centres on the coterie of
young Tories who arrived at the university in the
mid- or late-1980s, became prominent members of
the Oxford Union, and went on to run the country.
While Boris Johnson (pictured in 1985) is the pre-
eminent figure in this group, Kuper’s survey includes a host of ancillary
characters, among them Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the former MEP
Daniel Hannan. It’s no accident, Kuper suggests, that so many leading Brexiteers
emanated from this clique (which pointedly doesn’t include David Cameron, who
took no interest in politics at Oxford). Their experiences at the Union taught
that wit and flair mattered more than fact-based argument – and, according
to Kuper, this mindset contributed to the distortions of the Brexit campaign.
Kuper, who arrived at Oxford in 1988 from a state school, is “excellent” on
the university’s undergraduate culture, said Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times.
“Bluffing your way through tutorials was considered an art,” he recalls – and
he gives the example of Simon Stevens, a contemporary of Johnson’s (and later
head of NHS England) who apparently once read out almost half an essay
before his tutor realised he was “reading” from a blank piece of paper. Of
course, such “frivolity and entitlement” wasn’t unique to this particular cohort,
said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. Others around that time were in thrall to the
Brideshead myth. But where Boris and his chums differed is that they never grew
out of their “unseriousness”. Kuper’s anatomy of the failings of our “decadent
and deeply unprofessional ruling class” makes for a “fascinating” read.Chums
by Simon Kuper
Profile 240pp £16.99
The Week Bookshop £13.99Novel of the week
Bad Relations
by Cressida Connolly
Viking 288pp £14.99
The Week Bookshop £11.99Cressida Connolly’s “haunting” novel centres on
“two shocking bereavements, separated by more
than a century”, said Anthony Quinn in The
Observer. The first occurs on the “battlefield in
the Crimea, where Captain William Gale cuts a
lock of hair from the head of his dead younger
brother, Algie – a memento for their parents”.
The second takes place in Cornwall in 1977,
when one of Gale’s descendants, a mild-
mannered Australian teenager, visits his cousins
in England, and is initiated into drugs and sex.
With great delicacy, and a “superbly noticing
eye”, Connolly draws connections between
these events, showing how “fragments of the
past overlay the present”. Few writers today
are as adept at extracting “such intricate,
compelling drama from close-knit families”.
Novels with “time-jumping storylines”
can end up an incoherent mess, said Melissa
Katsoulis in The Times. Not so this one.
Connolly is “effortlessly in control”, and her
prose “always rings true and lovely”. This is
a truly “ravishing novel” – “one of the most
satisfying” you’re likely to read this year.To order these titles or any other book in print, visit
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