The reissuing of Beverley Nichols's delightful books by Timber Press has sparked renewed interest in this unjustly neglected writer. He burst onto the literary scene not long after his studies at Oxford, and his versatility was impressive; his successes included novels, plays, children's stories, biography, political commentary, and books on religion, travel, and gardening. He also composed for the musical stage and ghostwrote the autobiography of the famous singer Nellie Melba. He moved in fashionable and artistic circles where he attained a certain measure of celebrity. Fame did not elude him, but greatness did. In his later years, Nichols was known chiefly for his books on gardens and cats, and he grew increasingly bitter about his failure to be accepted as a serious writer. Bryan Connon has written a fascinating study of a talented man in whom, in J. W. Lambert's phrase, a keen mind "functioned beneath the glad rags," and whose huge and diverse literary output chronicles the events, moods, and personalities of the fascinating age in which he lived. This biography was first published in 1991 by Constable in the U.K., but its distribution was limited and it was never available in the United States. It will be of interest to the thousands of readers who have come to know Nichols through Merry Hall; they will discover an altogether more complex personality than the witty, sometimes sardonic persona he created in his writings.

Beverley Nichols : A Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Connon, Bryan

Arts & Literature

Timber Pr

No devoted reader of Beverley Nichols will want to be without Garden Open Tomorrow. The sequel to his famous Garden Open Today (with its open invitation to readers everywhere to come see his garden for themselves), this is his final garden book and the summation of a long career spent enjoying and writing about gardens. Being Beverley Nichols, however, he cannot confine himself to a narrow discussion of gardening for long and provides entertaining asides on cats --- including a hilarious critique of feline "ballet" performances --- psychic phenomena, and the use of plants to commit murder.

Garden Open Tomorrow

History

NICHOLS, Beverley

William McLaren

Europe

Timber Press

The reissuing of Beverley Nichols's delightful books by Timber Press has sparked renewed interest in this unjustly neglected writer. He burst onto the literary scene not long after his studies at Oxford, and his versatility was impressive; his successes included novels, plays, children's stories, biography, political commentary, and books on religion, travel, and gardening. He also composed for the musical stage and ghostwrote the autobiography of the famous singer Nellie Melba. He moved in fashionable and artistic circles where he attained a certain measure of celebrity.\nFame did not elude him, but greatness did. In his later years, Nichols was known chiefly for his books on gardens and cats, and he grew increasingly bitter about his failure to be accepted as a serious writer. Bryan Connon has written a fascinating study of a talented man in whom, in J. W. Lambert's phrase, a keen mind "functioned beneath the glad rags," and whose huge and diverse literary output chronicles the events, moods, and personalities of the fascinating age in which he lived.\nThis biography was first published in 1991 by Constable in the U.K., but its distribution was limited and it was never available in the United States. It will be of interest to the thousands of readers who have come to know Nichols through Merry Hall; they will discover an altogether more complex personality than the witty, sometimes sardonic persona he created in his writings.

Beverley Nichols: A Life

Somerset Maugham and the Maugham Dynasty is a frank and uncompromising biography of the Maugham family from the 1800s to 1981. In Bryan Connon's vigorous reassessment of Willie Somerset Maugham's life, we see a different Maugham from the one of popular myth. Instead of the shy stuttering medical student, there is the young man about town thoroughly at home in the Louche social circles of Oscar Wilde's London. Throughout his brilliant career Willie led a double life: his marriage to Syrie was a sham and he spent much of it abroad with his American lover, Gerald Haxton, who had been barred from the UK as a security risk. In 1927 he finally left England to live on Cap Ferrat in the Villa Mauresque, dubbed by Noel Coward 'the other Vatican'. Here he played pontiff and received the famous and the infamous, everyone from royals to rent boys. In his final years, senile and manipulated by Alan Searle, his elderly and avaricious secretary-lover, he attempted to disown his daughter and adopt Searle as his son. The mockery that greeted this was kept from him, as was the anger and derision caused by his memoirs, in which he attacked his dead wife and claimed to be a red-blooded heterosexual. Also told in this book is the story of the life and work of wartime hero Robin, second Viscount Maugham, author of Come to Dust and The Servant.

Somerset Maugham and the Maugham Dynasty

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Books by Connon, Bryan