Ein tolles Leben

Nach dem Buch über Bücher, übers Lernen, über Musik und Genuss - das mir wieder extrem gut gefallen hat, habe ich am Dienstag Abend dann noch eine neue Biographie begonnen. Ich kannte Philip Sassoon zwar nicht, aber schon der Klappentext hat mich super-neugierig gemacht. Und auch diese Biographie begeistert mich, denn sie erzählt von einem tollen Leben unter den Reichen und Schönen und Berühmten. Schriftsteller, Schauspieler, Politiker und Prinzen gehörten zum Leben des reichen Philip Sassoon.

 

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Damian COLLINS
Charmed Life

The Phenomenal World of Philip Sassoon

Description: The story of a fascinating man who connected the great politicians, artists and thinkers at the height of British global power and influence. A famed aesthete and patron, Philip Sassoon's world was one of luxury and classic English elegance with oriental flair. He gathered a social set that would provide inspiration for Brideshead Revisited. At his famous parties you might find Winston Churchill arguing over the tea cups with George Bernard Shaw, the Prince of Wales playing tennis with Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward mingling with flamingos and Lawrence of Arabia and Rex Whistler painting murals as the party carried on around him.

 

But Philip Sassoon was not just a wealthy aesthete. He worked at the right hand of Douglas Haig during the First World War and then for Prime Minister Lloyd George for the settlement of the peace. He was close to King Edward VIII during the abdication crisis, and Minister for the Air Force in the 1930s. And neither was he wholly 'English'. The heir of a family of wealthy Jewish traders from the souks of Baghdad, Philip craved acceptance from the English establishment, many of whom thought him both foreign and too exotic. He opened his house to his friends but rarely his heart, and as he was almost certainly homosexual.

 

In 'Charmed Life', Damian Collins explores an extraordinary product of an age; a man who, before dying prematurely aged only 50, in June 1939, Noel Coward called a 'phenomenon that would never recur'.