Les Temps Perdus
STuDENrrs of social history who select the years entre les guerres as their special period will find themselves abundantly justified
in their choice. For although that particular era is undoubtedly remote it is singularly well-defined ; the cast emerges frantically two-stepping from out of the clouds of one war to vanish trucking into the gloom of another. Moreover, so little serious research has as yet been undertaken that it provides an almost virgin field for the keen investigator. And now there appears Mr. Quennell's admirable little book, which will undoubtedly remain for many years to come the standard introductory study, inspiring and informative, while still leaving the field clear for the production of more advanced works.
It was a singularly happy thought on the part of the author to build his book around the fascinating character of Cecil Beaton, an elusive figure about whom too little is known but who occupied in relation to his age much the same position as did the Comte d'Orsay in the preceding century. The innumerable photographs taken by this talented man, excellently reproduced, do much to make those old bones live again, and as we turn the pages the past springs to life once more until we can almost believe that we knew these personages, attended their routs and walked in their company through the distant streets of that vanished London. Here, exactly as they looked in life, one finds not only the statesmen and the artists whose careers and works are familiar to every school-child, but also many of those almost fabulous characters who exist today only in the pages of the memoir writers. Lady Diana Cooper whose beauty was the wonder of the age (wife of one of innumerable Ministers of Information in the Churchill regime, who incidentally wrote an excellent life of Talleyrand), Lady Alexander famed for hats, that Lord Berners whose folly still dominates the Vale of the White Horse, legendary figures whose personalities bulked so large in the world of their contemporaries that, despite the absence of any concrete achievements, they have nevertheless survived as names of almost mythological significance.
Occasionally surprises occur. So tyrannical has our sense of period become that we tend to forget that every age overlaps with another and that seemingly cast-iron divisions are purely artificial. Thus it is with something of a shock that one encounters in these pages characters from an even more remote past who must, one fancies, even in Beaton's time, have worn an almost fabulous- air—Lily Langtry, Max Beerbohm and Walter Sicken.
Now that this rich vein of social history has been so expert!y opened up one looks forward to the appearance of mote specialised works dealing with particular aspects of the subject. What an abundant choice of theses confronts the specialis:s-- Schiaparelli considered as an art-force, the origin of " Oxford Bags," the relationship of the crooner to the torch-singer, porno- graphic gramophone records of the 'thirties, Dr. Buchman core
sidered as a manifestation of the Surrealist movement—all these and many other subjects will, one trusts, attract the attention of those engaged on post-graduate studies. For the general public, no less than for the student, the present volume provides an admirable and fascinating introduction to a society which, although admittedly sadly lacking in moral purpose when viewed from the standpoint of our own or the Victorian age, still evokes a certain nostalgia. Of the author's wide learning every page provides abundant testimony ; of his deep sympathy with the age he describes the inclusion of a photograph of himself in the costume of the period affords a whimsical proof.
OSBERT LANCASTER.
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