Marina Maxwell
  • Home
  • MMMusings
  • Blogs
  • About Me
  • My Books
  • Book Reviews
  • FAMILY TALES

Reviews

Categories

All


I read and review both historical fiction and non-fiction, but also enjoy biographies, crime and some contemporary fiction.
​ 

Please note that unless stated that I have received these books directly from the publisher or author in exchange for an honest review, I either purchase my own copies or source them from my local library service. 

​Links to Amazon, Book Depository or Dymocks Australia are only for the reader's reference.
(Due to some poor experiences recently with Booktopia, from 2023 I will no longer link to them.)

My reviews for Historical Novels Review, the magazine of the Historical Novel Society, can be found online here
​

The Riviera Set

19/12/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
Once upon a time there was a beautiful captain’s daughter from Maine called Jessie Dermot. Rather than running off to sea like the men in her family, she skipped away from some messy personal matters and went on the stage, changing her name to Maxine Elliott. In due course she would use her sex appeal and savvy business sense to reach the pinnacle of the social ladder and the ultimate prize of a dalliance with King Edward VII.
 
When Maxine decided to retire in the early 1930s, and using the skills of renowned architect Barry Dierks, she built herself a striking confection of a house known as Chateau de l’Horizon near Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera. She began inviting the glitterati of the age to come and keep her company. And what a roll-call of names it was: politicians, royalty, movie stars, artistes. There were the notorious good-time girls of the English upper classes being the three “D’s”, Daisy Fellowes, Doris Castlerosse and Diana Cooper. Noel Coward played the piano. Winston Churchill rode the slippery water slide into the Mediterranean. Edward and Mrs Simpson, later to be Duke and Duchess of Windsor, found it a refuge from the storm around the abdication crisis.
 
Maxine’s reign ended early in World War II when the house was trashed due to the tramping in and out of various armies, and its next incarnation was under the ownership of Prince Aly Khan, playboy religious leader, whose infamous womanising antics dominated the gossip sheets throughout the 1950s. When he married Rita Hayworth in 1949, the lavish reception at Chateau de l’Horizon demonstrated an excess that had a world still recovering from trauma all agog. The house is now under the ownership of the Saudi royal family and the story of the Chateau is far from over yet.
 
There is a strange kind of compulsion in reading about these people with their brilliance, beauty and high achievement mixed with hedonism, immorality and irresponsibility. With so many of them doomed to tragic ends it is all too easy to demonstrate your own inverted snobbery about their shallowness while secretly, of course, you must be a little envious.
 
Mary S. Lovell always writes excellent biographies and although this particular work contains too broad a compass to explore any of the individuals in depth, it is still a most enjoyable way of curling up and idling away your own hours immersed in an era when “the worst possible behaviour was to be boring” and when wit and sophistication, glamour and style were at their peak.
 
4.5 stars.
 
(With many thanks to Hachette Australia for sending me an advance reader’s copy.)

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Booktopia

0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Categories

    All

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    October 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    October 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015

    See
    Historical Novel Society
    ​
    for my reviews of historical fiction
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • MMMusings
  • Blogs
  • About Me
  • My Books
  • Book Reviews
  • FAMILY TALES