5/22/2023 0 Comments Love and friendship book summary![]() ![]() The final affair described in this book was with the black American jazz pianist Henry Crowder, said Laura Freeman in The Times. ![]() The “friendship” 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”. 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”). “Far from ruining her life”, it “proved a liberation”, enabling her to satisfy her “seemingly insatiable appetitive for sex” without fear of pregnancy. 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. ![]() Packed with “amusing anecdote and salacious detail”, this is a “racily enjoyable book”. 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”. Her “roller-coaster life” has inspired several biographies, including “outstanding” ones by Anne Chisholm and Lois Gordon. The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight: an ‘endlessly readable’ book. ![]()
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