A Taste of Love

'I have starved in some of the most beautiful places in the world . . .'

The Irish Times food writer Theodora FitzGibbon's bohemian appetite for love, pleasure, good food and adventure took her all over the globe until she died, in Dublin, in 1991.

Her two-volume autobiography reveals a life fully lived: the names she used before settling on 'Theodora'; the cookery lessons given to her by the former Queen Natalie of Serbia; the 1920s childhood spent on food-chomping travels with her rakish naval officer father in Europe, the Middle East and India.

Paris in the 1930s was home to Theodora's struggles to maintain an independent life as a young actress, where she began an affair with photographer Peter Rose Pulham and kept company with Balthus, Cocteau, Dali and Picasso. She escaped wartime Paris to live in London during the Blitz and was friendly with Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, Augustus John, Francis Bacon, Shane Leslie and Soviet spy Donald Maclean. She adopted Gwladys the penguin and Mouche the poodle. She married Irish-American writer Constantine FitzGibbon in 1944 and divorced him fifteen famously stormy years later. In 1960 she married George Morrison, the film maker and archivist, and they lived together in Dalkey in the house with the 'sea at the bottom of the garden'.

Be enthralled by the fascinating story behind the woman who broadened the culinary horizons of many people in Ireland and beyond. In this highly entertaining memoir, discover the sights, sounds and tastes of Theodora FitzGibbon - food writer, adventurer and thoroughly modern woman.

'Theodora FitzGibbon was the most extraordinary woman. If you read her autobiography you realise how many lives she led. And in fact how many people she was all rolled into one.'

Maeve Binchy

'Oh to live a day in the life of Theodora FitzGibbon' - The Irish Times Magazine

'Long before Nigella Lawson or Mary Berry, there was Theodora FitzGibbon, model, actress, author and muse.' - Emily Hourican, Sunday Independent

'I can't recommend this book enough. It's part Austen, part Mitford and yet completely Theodora. What a dame.' - Domin Kemp, The Irish Times