The Latest(ish)
The new Obama poster has brought on much hysteria, but also genuine concerns. If the right to vote (or not vote) for our leaders is a sign of a healthy democracy, so is the right not just to criticize, but also to insult them. Jeering, heckling, and rude, impious laughter are no less a part of the democratic process than the force-fed ecstasy of a party convention, the cheers of the shining-eyed faithful, or the complacent applause at rubber-chicken dinners. A statement of the obvious? You’d think so, but judging by some of the more overwrought reactions to a new [...]
Playing the Joker
August 18, 2009
The aesthete-aristocrat who was always in on the joke. Lord Berners Composer Writer Painter by Peter Dickinson Boydell Press, 214 pp., $47.95 It is easier to describe the appearance of Gerald Tyrwhitt (1883-1950), the 14th, and strangest, Lord Berners, than the man himself. In his short story The Love-Bird, Osbert Sitwell gave his hero (a version of Berners) a “natural air of quiet, ugly distinction.” Cecil Beaton thought that Berners resembled “a bald wax figure in a cheap clothes shop,” while the cat-loving author Beverley Nichols was suitably feline, claiming that there was “a legend that nobody who has ever [...]
Lord Ha-Ha
August 10, 2009
Lord Berners - Composer Writer Painter by Peter Dickinson; published originally in The Weekly Standard