The glamour of yesteryear is prominent in this book about the French Riviera in the first half of the twentieth century. Many famous figures make appearances - Winston Churchill, Aga Khan, Rita Hayworth - but the center is the Art Deco Château de l’Horizon, a villa owned by American socialite Maxine Elliot that hosted the rich and famous. This book makes for fun reading and I appreciated the details included about the lives of this glamorous social set, but it's certainly not a critical assessment of the wealth and social privilege within which these figures existed. ( )

read 2023

Mediocre pop history of the Hello! magazine varietal. It’s billed as a look at the high-society set that was drawn to the French Riviera roughly between the 1910s and the 1960s, told through the history of a single villa: the Art Deco Château de l’Horizon. If Mary Lovell had actually done that—paired the letters and diaries of the rich and famous with, say, oral histories or recollections from the local people employed to wait on them—this might have been a fascinating book.

Instead this is an unwieldy, patchwork effort which uses even tenuous connections to the villa to discuss people whom Lovell clearly finds charming and entertaining. I was not similarly enamoured. Frankly, I thought most of them sounded like assholes. Maybe assholes who were beautiful and with good taste in clothes and decor, but I’m not sure how that makes them inherently that much more interesting than an Instagram influencer. Less tacky, maybe, but no less vulgar or shallow.

And then there’s Lovell’s failure—whether through reluctance or inability—to demonstrate any clear-eyed assessment of her subjects. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor are treated sympathetically rather than as the snobbish crypto-fascists they were; Winston Churchill is given a treatment that borders on the hagiographical; the Aga Khan’s obscene wealth (derived ultimately from the donations of followers largely based in developing countries and compounded by the fact that he pays basically no taxes in his country of domicile, France) is handwaved as fine because, well, he gives a lot of money to charity.

To be fair, Lovell also seems unwilling to take a critical look at many of those likely to read this book. Writing about Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph, Lovell notes that he was “convinced that he would emulate Pitt [the Younger] and be Prime Minister by the time he was twenty-five”, but that English people’s “natural distaste of bumptiousness” and Randolph’s lack of “humanity and […] common sense” (101-102) meant that he would never achieve his aim. It was quite the trip to sit there as an Irishperson alive during the premiership of Boris Johnson and read about how English people could never be so distasteful as to elect a self-important buffoon with no fellow feeling for others. Entertaining, but probably not in the way that Lovell intended. ( )

disappointed. people weren't that interesting. ( )

This is kind of a book of two halves: we begin with a biography of American actress-turned-socialite Maxine Elliott, whose career took an upward trajectory from theatrical success, through canny investments and cultivation of the Right People, so that she ultimately established quite a salon in her Riviera villa. Many great names flit in and out...Royals, politicians Bright Young Things aplenty.
Then came the War, everyone went home...and the house was ultimately acquired and renovated by playboy Aly Khan and a new set of visitors.
Well researched, made me think more of a newspaper article than a book I could hugely get into, as characters come and go (perhaps Winston Churchill was the only one to figure cthroughout.) By and large an over-indulged, shallow, loose-living bunch. Quite interesting. For all the fabulous luxury, I think I'd have been awfully bored by most of the inmates ( )