Acton, Harold – The Bell Bookshop

Nancy Mitford

Emma — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is the biography of Nancy Mitford. Determined, attractive and amusing, the eldest and most famous of the Mitford sisters was a satirical novelist and controversial journalist who observed the pretensions of her time with a keen and ruthless eye.

The Last Medici

Emma — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In his remarkable account of the last Medici, famous aesthete and historian Harold Acton (1904-1994) takes up the causes which led to the disappearance of a house which has left indelible traces on the art, literature and commerce of the world; and his book was one of the first attempts to deal with this despotic dynasty in a scholarly and impartial spirit.

Much has been written about the phenomenal career of the early Medici: and there are many biographies of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Cosimo I, and the Medicean Popes. But less has been written of the final phase, and Acton demonstrates the hand of death overshadowing the great family in a series of unfortunate marriages – how one by one they vanished into the void.

The Last Medici centres mainly round the fantastic figures of Princess Marguerite-Louise d’Orléans and her husband Cosimo III, most fatal of all the Medicean sovereigns. The last act closes on Gian Gastone, their cynical younger son, bedridden in the Pitti Palace, a florid figure of despair, with the Powers of Europe ever on the alert for the sound of his death-rattle.

Full of brilliant colour, rich comedy and lurid tragedy, The Last Medici is at the same time a scientific contribution to the records of an extraordinary and unforgettable period.

Memoirs of an Aesthete

Emma — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

‘We citizens of the world are neither famous nor spectacular. But there is a slow fire burning within us, and it is time for our latent energies to swell forth anew. It is time for us to reassert ourselves. And it is our duty to remind our fellow creatures of what they are fast forgetting, that true culture is universal.’

In this classic memoir Harold Acton offers a witty and vivid account of the first thirty-five years of his life (1904-39): from a boyhood among the dilettanti in Florence before the First World War, through his friendships with some of the great writers of his generation in Oxford and Paris, to his discovery of a spiritual home in Peking.

‘As if he were a latter-day Beckford or Horace Walpole, people will long study his books if only to catch an echo of his voice.’ Alan Pryce-Jones, Independent