The Baron de Cabrol’s legendary scrapbooks capture a golden era of glamour and reveal the sheer elegance and decadence of the cosmopolitan café society. The glamorous aristocrats Daisy and Fred de Cabrol formed one of the most prominent twentieth-century high-society couples on the international scene. Leading members of the exclusive café society, they socialized with the biggest names in the haut monde—from the Maharani of Kapurthala to Queen Amelia of Portugal to their close friends the Windsors. Reproducing pages from the scrapbooks crafted with beauty and wit by the Baron de Cabrol between 1938 and the 1960s, this volume reveals the privileged and extravagant world of the café society. Through collages, watercolors, and previously unpublished archival documents, readers will discover the exceptional journey through the golden age of elegance and art.

The story of the night club impresario whose wildly successful interracial club, Cafe Society, changed the American artistic landscape forever

Aristocrats, millionaires, painters, fashion designers, choreographers, and musicians of the café society fox-trot aboard cruise liners and mingle at dazzling parties in Paris. Exclusive, extravagant, and beautiful, these cosmopolitan socialites were the patrons who galvanized the phenomenal success of the greatest creators of the early twentieth century. It was a whirlwind of sumptuously decorated villas and yachts, up-and-coming haute couture and jewelry designers, and elite evening parties, immortalized by fashion photographers like Cecil Beaton. Combining elegance and fantasy, the members of the café society enjoyed a sophisticated, avant-garde lifestyle. Some of the century’s most original talents—from Cole Porter to Yves Saint Laurent—stepped into the limelight via the café society. Through archival photographs and period documents, this volume recounts in historical detail the intrigue and impact generated around the world by this stylish jet-set.

Most of us can’t make it through morning without our cup (or cups) of joe, and we’re not alone. Coffee is a global beverage: it’s grown commercially on four continents and consumed enthusiastically on all seven—and there is even an Italian espresso machine on the International Space Station. Coffee’s journey has taken it from the forests of Ethiopia to the fincas of Latin America, from Ottoman coffee houses to “Third Wave” cafés, and from the simple coffee pot to the capsule machine. In Coffee: A Global History, Jonathan Morris explains both how the world acquired a taste for this humble bean, and why the beverage tastes so differently throughout the world. Sifting through the grounds of coffee history, Morris discusses the diverse cast of caffeinated characters who drank coffee, why and where they did so, as well as how it was prepared and what it tasted like. He identifies the regions and ways in which coffee has been grown, who worked the farms and who owned them, and how the beans were processed, traded, and transported. Morris also explores the businesses behind coffee—the brokers, roasters, and machine manufacturers—and dissects the geopolitics linking producers to consumers. Written in a style as invigorating as that first cup of Java, and featuring fantastic recipes, images, stories, and surprising facts, Coffee will fascinate foodies, food historians, baristas, and the many people who regard this ancient brew as a staple of modern life.

In this book can be heard the merest edge of an enormous conversation. As they never were in life, we can imagine the speakers all gathered in some vast room, wearing name tags in case they don’t recognize each other (although some recognize each other all too well, and avoid contact). My heroes and heroines are here. An almanac combining a comprehensive survey of modern culture with an annotated index of who-was-who and what-was-what, Cultural Amnesia is Clive James’s unique take on the places and the faces that shaped the twentieth-century. From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Wittgenstein, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record – and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.

The Palaces of Memories is a journey into India through the Indian Coffee Houses, a national network of worker-owned cafs which can be found in cities throughout the sub-continent. The Coffee Houses simultaneously speak of a Post-Independence optimism and a now-faded grandeur. Stuart Freedman has visited more than thirty of the most significant and beautiful Coffee Houses throughout India. Away from the stereotypes of poverty and exotica they have allowed him to enter an 'ordinary' India, an environment which echoes the greasy-spoon cafes of a long-forgotten London.