It was called the London Season, and for three centuries it had been a time of fashionable suppers and brilliant balls that introduced England's most aristocratic and eligible girls to society. Though by 1939 the stately gavottes and minuets had long since given way to waltzes and fox-trots, the cream of young womanhood still curtsied low before the Queen and then went out to dance the night away with the young men they would one day marry. But the Season of 1939 was different: it was to be the last. And like many a finale, it lives on in memory as a lovely, enchanted dream, all the more beautiful for the horror and destruction that would follow so soon. Based on a wealth of first-hand reminiscences, press clippings, and memorabilia, 1939: The Last Season of Peace is a fascinating portrait of this fairy tale about to end. Itcaptures the end of an era as it recreates a world whose inhabitants still believed in empire and tradition. It is a vivid picture of a generation suspended in a brief moment of sunlit summer glory, before the gathering storm of World War II swept it all away.

1939 the Last Season of Peace

History

Angela Lambert

Europe

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

An original work exploring a rarely discussed group of late-Victorian intellectuals and aristocrats, "the Souls" - Margot Asquith, Arthur Balfour, George Curzon and others - who intersected with each other in both their London and country houses between 1890 and 1914. Shortlisted for the 1984 Whitbread Prize.

Unquiet Souls - The Indian Summer of the British Aristocracy

Papermac / Macmillan Publisher

"We who are members of the single classes, unmarried and unattached, are always waiting to fall in love...Every day and each encounter holds out the possibility of that momentous flash which will change everything." Constance Liddell, in her mid-forties, answers a personal column ad—"Polish gentleman, 50s, political refugee, seeks intellectual woman for marriage"—and arranges to meet Iwo Zaluski. For Constance, her work, children, friends and friendship with her charming, philandering ex-husband only sometimes alleviate the deeper longing for intimacy and marriage. Meeting Iwo Zaluski for the first time, on a walk on Hampstead Heath, she perceives in him the loneliness of a fellow exile. Too rapidly, she falls in love. Angela Lambert (1940—2007) was a British journalist, art critic and author, best known for the novel A Rather English Marriage. Born as Angela Maria Helps to a civil servant and a German-born housewife, she was unhappy when sent to Wispers School, a girls' boarding school in Sussex, where by the age of 12 she had decided that she wanted to be a writer. She went to St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she read politics, philosophy and economics. She began her career as a journalist in 1969, working for ITN before joining The Independent newspaper in 1988.

Love among the Single Classes

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Black Swan.

Roy Southgate and Reginald Conynghame-Jervis have nothing in common but their loneliness and their wartime memories. Roy, a retired milkman and Reggie, a former RAF Squadron Leader, are widowed on the same day. To assuage their grief, the vicar arranges for Roy to move in with Reggie as his unpaid manservant. To their surprise, they form a strange alliance, based on obedience, need and the strangeness of single life. Then Reggie meets Liz, a vibrant but near-bankrupt woman of irresistible appeal, while Roy and his son's family grow gradually closer. Marriage, it seems, however far from ideal, can be a great protector against isolation. Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) grew up in Hove and London. She was encouraged by her father, who sadly died from a sudden heart attack when she was sixteen, to read Classics from a young age. She attended Holloway College in London to study Classics and wrote her first novel Delores in 1911. Compton-Burnett suffered several losses after her father—her closest brother died three years later, three more of her younger siblings and her mother passed away by the time she was 35, something she rarely spoke about, but constantly visited in her novels. Compton-Burnett published twenty novels. However, the first of her works to use her mature and original style was published when she was forty, in 1925. Compton-Burnett's fiction is often said to be Edwardian in setting—the domestic occurrences in large households. She never married and lived in London as companion to Margaret Jourdain. She was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 1967.

A Rather English Marriage

The Constant Mistress

Kiss and Kin

BANTAM PRESS

Life for the newly widowed Harriet Capel is not expected to hold any surprises. It will be spent watching over the vicissitudes of her children's marriages and relationships, and looking after the grandchildren. That is, until she sees Oliver Gaunt again. He is her daughter-in-law's father. The relationship between the parents-in- law has always been difficult since their children's wedding day and few words have been spoken. When they meet, they do not at first recognise one another, but the physical attraction between them is powerful and instantaneous. As their love affair gathers intensity and pace, so do its consequences for the family as a whole.

Ulverscroft Large Print Books Ltd

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Angela Lambert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Angela Lambert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Angela Lambert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

1939 the Last Season of Peace

Unquiet Souls - The Indian Summer of the British Aristocracy

Love among the Single Classes

A Rather English Marriage

The Constant Mistress

Kiss and Kin

Kiss and Kin