http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/waugh_10_14.php Ménage à Quatre Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me By Sofka Zinovieff (Jonathan Cape 436pp £25) Gerald, Robert holding Victoria and Jennifer, by Cecil Beaton, 1943 In Red Princess, published in 2007, Sofka Zinovieff wrote critically and affectionately about her paternal grandmother, Princess Sofka Dolgorouky, a hard-drinking, promiscuous Russian aristocrat dedicated to
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/culture/books/non_fiction/article1465638.ece
Stravinsky once described Lord Berners as the best British composer of his generation. That has never been a widely shared view. Berners’s output was modest, amounting to only 30 pieces, and few would compare it with the work of Benjamin Britten or William Walton. Yet his music was adventurous and accomplished, and his contribution to
SOFKA ZINOVIEFF has form as a cultural explorer. She studied anthropology and did research in Greece, a country where she later settled and described insightfully and at times lyrically, both in fiction and memoir. In another work, tracing the life of one of her grandmothers, a communist Russian princess, she dives into the world of
Philip Henscher: “The books I liked best this year were all richly detailed. Why read a book unless it’s going to go into all the nooks and crannies: Everyone is going to recommend Sofka Zinovieff’s The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me about the ménage at Faringdon House. And rightly so – it
“Unputdownable… gloriously lavish, something fascinating to gaze at on every page. Sofka Zinovieff’s tale of Lord Berners and his lover is packed with money, sex, secrets and bad blood”. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/19/the-mad-boy-lord-berners-review-sofka-zinovieff-robert-heber-percy-victoria
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/books-feature/9340862/the-mad-boy-lord-berner-my-grandmother-and-me-by-sofka-zinovieff-review/
