Mount Juliet is a mid to late 18th century house built by the 1st Earl of Carrick in Co Kilkenny. It was sold to the McCalmonts in 1914 and a ballroom was added in the 1920s.
A theme of the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis letters is R H-D’s prodigious appetite for reading and eating. Not surprisingly, he is writing around 1960, the best meals are abroad.
Today I’m going for a little-longer-than-usual walk; a fourteen-miler in Cambridgeshire to raise money for the Royal Marsden Hospital. It will be a doddle in comparison with The Ascent of Rum Doodle.
This year’s biography of Molly Keane by her daughter, Sally Phipps, is a good read. As I read it I wondered how she knew so much about her mother’s childhood.
I read excellent reviews of Sally Phipps’s biography of her mother, Molly Keane. The best was in The Oldie but they left me pretty sure that I didn’t need to read her book. However, fate intervened.
Galateo has never been out of print, at least in Italy, since it was written in the 1550s. Its author, Giovanni Della Casa, was born near Florence in 1503.
If you went to Eton you know what beaks are – if you didn’t, it is what the teachers are called. In 1959, in Bud Hill’s house, there were two extra beaks.
Continuing the theme of writers who have sunk into obscurity, I was given a 1946 novel by Phyllis Bottome for Christmas. She must have spent a lot of time repeating, “Bottome with an E”.