Wallflower Dispatches

When this book first appeared in 1988, the romance of Safari fever was at its height. The movie “Out of Africa” had spawned a whole new revival in fashion with jodhpurs, leather and animal prints. The US designer Ralph Lauren launched the eponymous perfume and people rediscovered Beryl Markham, Isak Dinesen and the notorious “Happy [...]

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Nancy Cunard “Negro – An Anthology”
In 1928, Nancy Cunard, the beautiful, intelligent, British upper class heiress to the Cunard shipping line fortune fell in love. She had tried to play her alloted part in British post-war society and failed. Instead, she moved to Paris, fell in with some of the great writers and poets of her [...]

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Isak Dinesen “Out of Africa”

Ernest Hemingway esteemed her so highly that he said: “She wrote perhaps the best book about Africa that I ever read.”, and paid tribute to her in his Nobel Prize speech. Karen Blixen aka Isak Dinesen wrote ‘Out of Africa’ in the 1930s, years after she was forced to leave for [...]

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Osa Johnson: “I Married Adventure”

While being a treasured prop for fashionable stylists (see the cool design blog Style Court for the most fun list of sightings) might be a dubious recommendation for a literally minded sort, Osa Johnson’s 1941 memoir “I Married Adventure” keeps all the promise its zebra-print cover and intriguing title suggests. From [...]

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