Showing results by author "Juliet Nicolson" in All Categories

As narrated on BBC Radio 4. All families have their myths and legends. For many years Juliet Nicolson accepted hers - the dangerous beauty of her flamenco dancing great-great-grandmother, Pepita; the flirty manipulation of her great-grandmother, Victoria; the infamous eccentricity of her grandmother, Vita; her mother's Tory-conventional background. But then Juliet, a renowned historian, started to question. As she did so, she sifted fact from fiction, uncovering details and secrets long held just out of sight.

One summer of nearly a hundred years ago saw one of the high sunlit meadows of English history. A new king was crowned; audiences swarmed to Covent Garden to see the Ballet Russes and Nijinskys gravity-defying leaps. The aristocracy was at play, bounding from house party to the next; the socialite Lady Michelham travelled with her nineteen yards of pearls. Rupert Brooke (a 23-year-old poet in love with love, Keats, marrons glaces and truth) swam in the river at Grantchester.

As the euphoria of Armistice Day in 1918 quickly subsided, there was no denying the carnage that the Great War had left in its wake. Grief and shock overwhelmed the psyche of the British people - but from their despair, new life would slowly emerge.

On Boxing Day 1962, when Juliet Nicolson was eight years old, the snow began to fall. It did not stop for 10 weeks. The drifts in East Sussex reached 23 feet. In London, milkmen made deliveries on skis. On Dartmoor 2,000 ponies were buried in the snow and starving foxes ate sheep alive. It wasn't just the weather that was bad. The threat of nuclear war had reached its terrifying height with the recent Cuban Missile Crisis. 

England, 1936. A beloved king is dead, and by year’s end, the charismatic new monarch will give up his throne for love. The world is on the brink of war. And in the tumultuous intervening months, three outsiders will find themselves embroiled in the hidden truths, undeclared loves, unspoken sympathies, and covert complicities of a glittering high society in the throes of upheaval.