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Secret Satan, 2023
Berlin is cold and dark, there’s snow on the ground and the supermarkets are full of Lebkuchen and testy shoppers, so … it must be time for Secret Satan! Here we go with our annual serving of books...
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Summer* reading list
You didn’t see me. I’m just going to leave these ten book selections here, but keep it to yourself. If you tell anybody they’ll be like “I don’t know what you think you saw, because James only does...
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Amazon in her prime
Growing up in Australia, Halloween was something I only knew about from American movies rather than a matter of lived experience. As an adult I happened to be in New York at the end of October one...
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Secret Satan, 2019 translation edition
We now turn to a highly subjective selection from the phenomenal wealth of books translated into English that appeared throughout 2019, encompassing a narrower thematic range than our original English...
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19 books for 2019
Such are the peculiarities of this most seasonal of seasons that our rundown of forthcoming titles comes at an indecently brief interval after our last bookish blow-out; this Janus-faced time of...
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My one, my eternal mate
In a welcome recent phenomenon, gay men in a number of countries who were prosecuted for “gross indecency” in less enlightened times – often with catastrophic and even fatal consequences – have had...
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Last night I dreamt I went to rue Jacob again
Were I to tell you that there exists interview footage of someone, somewhere, discussing Alice B. Toklas in the present tense while also recalling a midnight tête-à-tête with Marcel Proust and a...
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16 books for (what’s left of) 2016
It’s been quite a January round Flowers’ way, so this selection of the year’s forthcoming titles of interest is a little later than hoped. But there’s still eleven months left in this thing. Please...
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Wild hearts in wartime
Barney and Romaine Brooks in Florence (from Wild Heart, by Suzanne Rodriguez) The writer/saloniste Natalie Clifford Barney and her early 20th century Left Bank circle are attracting more attention than...
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Autour de Jacques
Thanks to Front Free Endpaper (now celebrating seven years of blogging, which is 415 lifetimes in real terms, or something) for highlighting this catalogue, written in French and English and detailing...
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Dress-down Friday equestrian special
In honour of the Chinese New Year and the Year of the Horse which begins today, here is a look at some of our favourite strange flowers in equestrian elegance mode. There’s Renée Sintenis (again),...
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Amazons in space
You may have missed this vital piece of astronomical news over the holiday season: a crater on the planet Mercury has been named for Left Bank lesbohemian legend Natalie Clifford Barney. She joins...
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Romaine Brooks | portraits
It’s not that Romaine Brooks’ portraits didn’t, as Truman Capote put it, represent “the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts”. They did, but there was a...
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Wild hearts at midnight
It’s that time of the year again, when costumed apparitions turn society on its head, strange creatures emerge from the undergrowth, and the most diffident wallflower can blossom into a glamorous...
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Dress-down Friday: Liane de Pougy
Like her great rival La Belle Otero, French Belle Époque courtesan Liane de Pougy was a hugely popular postcard motif of the era. Their blue-blooded suitors may have showered them with gifts and hard...
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Circles: Charles Henri Ford
Charles Henri Ford’s vanity turns 100 today. Its owner, poet and publisher Charles Henri Ford, was by all reliable accounts born in Mississippi on this day in 1908 but he insisted that he was born in...
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Circles: Natalie Clifford Barney
Brooks & Barney Well…this was inevitable, wasn’t it? Once the idea of mapping connections between writers, artists and undefinable members of semi-forgotten scenes was in the air, it was a given...
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The Other Amazon
Art historian Kerrin Meis recently gave a lecture on Paris-based painter Romaine Brooks, long overshadowed by her charismatic lover. I quote from the lecture introduction, largely because it contains...
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Pearls: Natalie Clifford Barney
At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly,...
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Grey eminence (repost)
From December 2009, the troubled life and work of an undervalued portraitist. You can find a different side to her art here, and explore her long, difficult relationship with Natalie Barney here. •...
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