Andrew Ginger – författare

Cecil Beaton (1904 1980) was one of twentieth- century Britain s Renaissance men: photographer, costume designer, set designer, playwright, creator of fashion fabrics, and writer on raffine interiors and the personalities who inhabited them. He also happened to be a fine interior decorator. Cecil Beaton at Home focuses on two homes dear to Beaton s heart Ashcombe House, near the Wiltshire village of Tollard Royal, and Reddish House, located in Broad Chalke, another village in the same county as well as London's Pelham Place and Beaton s New York hotel suites. Simultaneously a retreat, an inspiration, a photographer s studio, and a stage for impressive entertaining, Beaton s country homes also fuelled his passion for art, gardening, and delight in village life. Against his often-extravagant interiors, Beaton s private life unfolds his unique talent for self-promotion, desire for theatricality, and uncertain pursuit of love. This lavishly illustrated visual biography brings together original photographs, artworks, and possessions from his interiors to present an intimate picture of Beaton s extraordinary life.

This revelatory book offers a fresh and profoundly personal perspective on Cecil Beaton s life, shaped through his final and most sustaining love affair. Drawing on never-before-published photographs Beaton and his last partner, Kinmont Hoitsma, took of one another, as well as the tender, revealing letters they exchanged, it opens a rare window onto the private world they shared the homes they lived in, the rooms they inhabited, and the emotional space they created together. By 1963, Beaton was at the height of international fame, working in Hollywood on My Fair Lady. Yet behind the public success lay decades of fraught and often unfulfilled relationships, shaped by the criminalization of homosexuality in Britain. In Hoitsma an American ex-Olympian fencer and art historian who lived openly within San Francisco s emerging gay community Beaton found something wholly unexpected: mutual affection, emotional honesty, and a sense of peace. Their year together at Beaton s home in Wiltshire marked a turning point, allowing Beaton, for the first time, to acknowledge his identity with a new clarity and openness. Though they ultimately accepted that a permanent domestic partnership was not possible, their bond endured until Beaton s death in 1980. Framed through this late-life relationship, the book traces the broader arc of Beaton s extraordinary career and inner life his artistic ambitions, his cultivated interiors, and the seamless way he wove photography, fashion, theater, and design into a singular aesthetic vision. At once a love story, a portrait of an artist, and a meditation on self-acceptance, this book reveals Beaton as never before seen.

The nineteenth-century Hispanic world was shattered to its core by war, civil war, and revolution. At the same time, it confronted a new period of European and North-American expansion and development. In these essays, authors explore major, dynamic ways that people in Spain envisaged how they would adapt and change, or simply continue as they were. Each chapter title begins with the words “How to...”, and examines the ways in which Spaniards conceived or undertook major activities that shaped their lives. These range from telling the time to being a man. Adaptability, paradox, and inconsistency come to the fore in many of the essays. We find before us a human quest for opportunity and survival in a complex and changing world. This wide-ranging book contains chapters by leading scholars from the United States, United Kingdom, and Spain.

When all that was solid melted into air... For decades, intellectuals from Benjamin to Bourdieu, Berman to Foucault, have been in thrall to this vision of the mid-nineteenth century. It shaped and underpinned their most influential thoughts, its legacy insinuated into institutionalized theories of culture. In this new book, that vision implodes, as if in a cultural supernova, its exceptionalism and limitations exposed. The story of modernity fades before a spectacle of linkages, stretching from and into the depths of history, the breadths of place. And, in a parallel substitution, the vast territories of the former Spanish Empire’s thread through the narrative, rather than lurking on the peripheries, no longer just the fallen founders of modernity. Instead of modernity goes to the very heart of comparative cultural study: the question of what happens when intimate, dynamic connections are made over place and time, what it is to feel at home amid the lavish diversity of culture. This ambitious interdisciplinary book reconsiders foundational figures of the modern western canon, from Darwin to Cameron, Baudelaire to Whistler. It weaves together brain images from France, preserved insects from the Americas, glass in London, poetry from Argentina, paintings from Spain. Flaubert, Whitman, and Nietzsche find themselves with Hostos from Puerto Rico and Gorriti from Argentina. The flotsam and jetsam of history – optical toys from Madrid – sit with Melville and Marx. The book ranges over theoretical fields: trauma and sexuality studies, theories of visuality, the philosophy of sacrifice and intimacy, the thought of Wittgenstein.Instead of modernity is an adventure in the practice of comparative writing: resonances join suggestively over place and time, the textures of words, phrases and images combine to form moods. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the question of modernity and with the fate of cultural theory and comparison.