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 Through collages, watercolors, and previously unpublished archival documents, readers will discover the exceptional journey through the golden age of elegance and art.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.

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.

“A dynamic group biography studded with design history and high-society dash . . . [This] elegantly wrought narrative bears the Cartier hallmark.”—The Economist The “astounding” (André Leon Talley) story of the family behind the Cartier empire and the three brothers who turned their grandfather’s humble Parisian jewelry store into a global luxury icon—as told by a great-granddaughter with exclusive access to long-lost family archives “Ms. Cartier Brickell has done her grandfather proud.”—The Wall Street Journal The Cartiers is the revealing tale of a jewelry dynasty—four generations, from revolutionary France to the 1970s. At its heart are the three Cartier brothers whose motto was “Never copy, only create” and who made their family firm internationally famous in the early days of the twentieth century, thanks to their unique and complementary talents: Louis, the visionary designer who created the first men’s wristwatch to help an aviator friend tell the time without taking his hands off the controls of his flying machine; Pierre, the master dealmaker who bought the New York headquarters on Fifth Avenue for a double-stranded natural pearl necklace; and Jacques, the globe-trotting gemstone expert whose travels to India gave Cartier access to the world’s best rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, inspiring the celebrated Tutti Frutti jewelry. Francesca Cartier Brickell, whose great-grandfather was the youngest of the brothers, has traveled the world researching her family’s history, tracking down those connected with her ancestors and discovering long-lost pieces of the puzzle along the way. Now she reveals never-before-told dramas, romances, intrigues, betrayals, and more. The Cartiers also offers a behind-the-scenes look at the firm’s most iconic jewelry—the notoriously cursed Hope Diamond, the Romanov emeralds, the classic panther pieces—and the long line of stars from the worlds of fashion, film, and royalty who wore them, from Indian maharajas and Russian grand duchesses to Wallis Simpson, Coco Chanel, and Elizabeth Taylor. Published in the two-hundredth anniversary year of the birth of the dynasty’s founder, Louis-François Cartier, this book is a magnificent, definitive, epic social history shown through the deeply personal lens of one legendary family.