Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric ebook

by MARK AMORY

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Find sources: "Lord Berners" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this template message). Amory, Mark (3 June 1999). Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric (New e. Lord Berners in 1935. Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners (18 September 1883 – 19 April 1950), also known as Gerald Tyrwhitt, was a British composer, novelist, painter and aesthete.

Here lies Lord Berners/One of life's learners,Thanks be to the Lord/He was never bored

Composer, writer, painter, and eccentric millionaire, Lord Berners led a life filled with music, art, travel, and high society

Composer, writer, painter, and eccentric millionaire, Lord Berners led a life filled with music, art, travel, and high society.

Berners, Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Baron, 1883-1950. Eccentrics and eccentricities - Great Britain - Biography. Novelists, English - 20th century - Biography. Art patrons - Great Britain - Biography. Diplomats - Great Britain - Biography. Composers - Great Britain - Biography. Great Britain - Social life and customs

Mark Amory's new biography, "Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric," traces the hedonistic and self-indulgent life of. .Amory also examines Lord Berners' literary output

Mark Amory's new biography, "Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric," traces the hedonistic and self-indulgent life of Gerald Tyrwhitt and his odd assortment of friends, who included some of the most supremely talented people of upper-class England, but which also comprised a collection of noted homosexuals, freeloaders, parasites, neurotics, and ambitious social climbers with whom he associated throughout his life. Amory also examines Lord Berners' literary output. Berners' wrote a series of novellas throughout his life, but the ones he wrote during the 1940's when he was undergoing a nervous breakdown are the most fascinating.

Lord Berners by Mark Amory (Paperback, 1999). Each month we recycle over . million books, saving over 12,500 tonnes of books a year from going straight into landfill sites. All of our paper waste is recycled and turned into corrugated cardboard.

For all Berners' wit and irony, and his outrageous behaviour, he had a warmth and humanity which shines through. This biography has had a rave reception from the Sunday papers

Composer, writer, painter and eccentric millionaire, Lord Berners led a life filled with music, art, travel and high society.

Composer, writer, painter and eccentric millionaire, Lord Berners led a life filled with music, art, travel and high society. Stravinsky, Picasso and Cocteau; the Sassoons, the Betjemans and the Sitwells; Harold Nicolson, Frederick Ashton and Gertrude Stein all were his friends and many came to stay at his house near Oxford, where the pigeons were dyed all colours of the rainbow and Salvador Dali played the piano in the swimming pool

Mark Amory’s entertaining book leaves one rather liking Berners, a most unpretentious man, but afflicted with a perennial and agonising dread of boredom.

Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric by Mark Amory Chatto, 274 pp, £2. 0, March 1998, ISBN 1 85619 234 2. The composer Lord Berners (1883-1950), as a dozen books of memoirs remind us, was very much a name in the Twenties and Thirties, in the sphere in which fashionable society meets the arts. Mark Amory’s entertaining book leaves one rather liking Berners, a most unpretentious man, but afflicted with a perennial and agonising dread of boredom. Sassoon’s idea that he was formidably ‘intellectual’ could not have been wider of the mark.

Here lies Lord Berners/One of life's learners, Thanks be to the Lord/He was never bored. So reads the epitaph on the gravestone of Lord Berners. In its witty way, it hints at his range of accomplishment. He was a composer (admired by Stravinsky), writer, painter, aesthete and eccentric, indeed in Mark Amory's words 'The Last Eccentric', famously dyeing the pigeons at his house, Faringdon, in vibrant colours, and, for a time, having a giraffe as a pet and tea companion. His literary and artistic milieu was glittering: Stravinsky, Picasso, Salvador Dali, Siegfried Sassoon, John Betjeman, the Sitwells, Harold Nicolson, Frederick Ashton and Gertrude Stein - they all belonged to it. In fiction, he was famously portrayed as Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love. 'As social history and a chronicle of a mad-cap English eccentric this long awaited, much needed and beautifully written book is, to use a simple cliché, indispensable.' Alexander Waugh, Literary Review 'In Amory, this engaging character has found the ideal biographer. Getting the exact measure of its subject throughout, written in a dry, wittily ironic prose ... the biography offers of sheer bliss.' Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times

AnnyMars

This is the second book I have read about Lord Berners, gay socialite of 1930's England; and prolific and talented composer, author and painter. One point that the author seems to want to make apparent, is that money will not buy happiness, but it certainly works to create a glamorous life and an entree into the arts. Berners inherited a title and a genetic predisposition to artistic talent. With ease, he was on a first name basis with the cream of 1930's British high society, which at that time was still dominated by the English aristocracy with inherited wealth. A second point the author makes is, how often can you have dinner with monsters without becoming one of them? Berners was close friends with Diana Mosely, wife of the head of the English pre-war fascist movement, and someone who continued to claim Hitler was right, even after the war. Berners was one of her best friends, and never once faltered in the friendship. Given her beliefs, one cannot help but wonder about Berners' own morality. Finally, the book clearly exhibits Berners' fabulous sense of humor, even though much of it is dated to the time period in which it is written and addressed to the aristocratic set Berners' hung out with. And perhaps, Berners' artistic achievement is what makes his life noteworthy, When other English aristocrats often were creating nothing and simply living in the same luxurious manner in which Berners lived, Berners left behind an artistic legacy and a sense of comedy that is timeless.

Love Me

An enjoyable read, giving real insight into the rather complicated personality of a very talented man, who as he matured had the courage, and means, to be himself, he created his own world and lived in it, without caring what others thought,
I end up liking the man for himself, when I learned, through his story, to be less critical and judgemental.

Arabella V.

This is a page-turner about an eccentric, a Brit, and I found his words important, illuminating, and funny. Arrived fast and in a good condition. Thank you.

SiIеnt

"Here lies Lord Berners
One of life's learners
Thanks be to the Lord
He never was bored"
(gravestone epitaph)

Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, the fourteenth Baron Berners, was one of the twentieth century's great eccentrics. He was also, as his gravestone truthfully reported, "never bored." Highly creative but also very frivolous, Lord Berner was famed for such stunts as dyeing the pigeons at his estate in rainbow hues and playing a clavichord placed in the back of his Rolls Royce. His social circle included members of the litterati such as Evelyn Waugh, Siegfried Sassoon, and Getrude Stein, as well as Igor Stravinsky, Cecil Beaton, and Salvador Dali. It's said that Nancy Mitford modeled her character Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love on him.

Lord Berners himself was a composer, novelist, playwright, and painter, with his work showing a strong surrealist and whimsical bent, never taking itself too seriously. He lived openly in a homosexual relationship on a vast estate that was something of a menagerie both socially and literally, with its numerous hangers-on and a pet giraffe roaming the grounds. Intent on a life of hedonism, he nevertheless produced some notable musical compositions and two memoirs. His various short stories and novellas were posthumously published as Collected Tales and Fantasies, and it was this book that initially led to my interest in this notable eccentric and aesthete.

Armory's biography does a good job of detailing the swirl of people and events in Lord Berners' life, but it seems curiously inert, somehow, in comparison to its subject. I'd hoped for a little more insight into the person and less for the external facts of his life. Still, it's the one of the few accounts we have of a complex and talented man, and it does capture the sense of the time and social milieu. Among the book's illustrations and photographs is a marvelous picture of a group having tea in Lord Berners' drawing room -- all very proper and English, with the lace tableloth and nick-knacks on the bireplace mantle. But then there's the large white horse standing placidly between two of the ladies, looking for all the world as if he were about to contribute to the table conversation -- this unusual animal apparently had free range of the house.

Full of snippets of correspondence and thousands of references to titled personages, literary luminaries, avant-garde artists of the day, this makes for bustling biography, one that serves as a portrait of a time. My one complaint is that it renders the age better than its ostensible subject.