Nicky Haslam
For Ferdinand Mount, in his masterly memoir Cold Cream (Bloomsbury, £20), memory’s madeleine is the cosmetic his titled mother advertised, with unorthodox audacity, in blotchy 1940s newsprint. I just remember the company’s sister product, which promised ‘Pond’s lipstick stays on . . . and on . . . and on.’ Mount’s calm, self-effacing and wistful envoi to a waning world, and his unexpected morph into Downing Street guru, stays on, indelible, in the reader’s mind.
Francis Wyndham’s dissecting ear for enigmatic tension — his grandmother was ‘the Sphinx’ to Oscar Wilde after all — is at it’s most acute in his short stories, recently gathered as a pungent bouquet in The Other Garden (Picador, £7.99) And, along with Wyndham’s chilling humour, you get an introduction by Alan Hollinghurst.
The Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Gallery, 38 Bury Street, London SW1, has produced, at £20, an indispensible catalogue, Lucian Freud: Early Works 1940-58 for their current exhibition (until 12 December). There is a preface by James Holland-Hibbert and an afterword by Catherine Lampert who, with David Dawson, helped curate the exhibition. The paintings are perfectly reproduced and relevant photographs of, and notes on, their subjects are socially, let alone intellectually, fascinating.
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