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“... life, between engagements, there was more time for a circle of friends that included the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, Noël Coward and Benjamin Britten. As time and death thinned the old guard she made new friendships, notably with Ted Hughes, arranging to split the laureate’s traditional allowance of sherry with him. Amid the fun there was an inevitably ...”

“... with how the past conceived its own past. How did 1930s sensibilities, from John Betjeman to Cecil Beaton, engage with Georgian and Victorian architecture? What of the interwar flirtation with the Baroque, spoken for by Sacheverell Sitwell, or the period’s notions of Neolithic Britain? (Massingham, a long-out-of-print ruralist, envisaged Silbury ...”

“... Hogarthian comedy, full of rapid and vivid incident, of pleasant or indignant humour’. In 1978 Cecil Beaton attributes to the society philanthropist Lady Anne Tree ‘an oversize personality and character – rorty, Hogarthian and with exquisite understanding of character’, and in 2003 a writer in the Economist evokes a ‘Hogarthian throng of ...”

“... art and high fashion were most closely in step with each other, Cunard – photographed by Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, Curtis Moffat, Cartier-Bresson, John Banting and others – was one of the figures in whom they converged. Gucci’s ‘Hard Deco’ line for Spring 2012 was launched in homage to ‘Louise Brooks and Nancy Cunard’. This edition of ...”

“... a negligible aspect of English taste in the Twenties and Thirties. Along with the photographs of Cecil Beaton, and the stage designs of Beaton and Messel, it set a style which influenced advertising, films and interior decoration. It vulgarised the past, prettified it into palatability, rather as ...”

“... be described as aristocratic-by-default, in the same contingent and self-legislating way that Cecil Beaton or Elsie de Wolfe was. Impeccably dressed in Poiret or Mainbocher, chummy with dukes and screen idols, little Madge from Melbourne seemed to make herself grand through an act of fiat lux. Esther Murphy on Long Island, 1923. Summing up his ...”

“... hands. One hand alone may clutch the brow (Martin Luther King, 1961), support the whole skull (Cecil Beaton, 1951), point its index finger into the upper lip (Colette, 1952) or into the lower lip (Tony Hancock, 1962), or feel the forelock (Francis Bacon, 1981); two hands may flatten against both cheeks (Lily Brik-Mayakovsky, 1954), interlock over the ...”

“... and a swathe of the European aristocracy what Winterhalter did for the young Queen Victoria and Cecil Beaton for the women of the House of Windsor. She invented them as one might invent characters in a novel, treading a delicate path between the swooning – very hard to treat Emma Hamilton any other way, but not right for a princess – and the ...”

“... his poetry. He was nevertheless an integral part of the Sitwell phenomenon. In the photographs of Cecil Beaton, for whom they posed often, they appear as an inseparable trinity caught from dramatic, sometimes elevated angles, their heads fitting together as if to present three aspects of a single personality. Greene’s intention is to do justice to his ...”

“... her sitters pleased her. She was expert at a kind of formal informality. In this, she resembles Cecil Beaton at the court of the young Elizabeth II: both produced a very highly worked art whose intended effect was of naturalness. She was very French. She spent three years in England, much of it – from Matlock to the Isle of Wight – reminding her of ...”

“... different. He built a studio ballroom in which he premiered his latest work for guests including Cecil Beaton and Joan Crawford. The local postmistress was rendered speechless one evening by being asked to put through a call from Marlene Dietrich. Goldenhurst enabled Coward to live and entertain in an extended household with his family, his staff, and ...”

“... furtively seeks out the camera’s gaze. He is posed by Man Ray, displaying his beautiful hands; Cecil Beaton photographs him smoking opium, in a sepia haze. He is portrayed by Philippe Halsman as a god with six arms, bearing pen, book, cigarette, scissors: caught between versions of himself, he becomes Cocteaux. As if refracted by these multiple ...”

“... Andy Warhol. Her sister Lee offered her support and then gossiped about her to Truman Capote and Cecil Beaton. (‘You don’t know what it is like being with Jackie,’ she told Beaton. ‘She can’t sleep at night and she can’t stop thinking about herself and never feeling anything but sorry for herself.’) When ...”

“... bikers and mustachioed, short-haired clones. At Oxford in the 1920s, gay aesthetes like Cecil Beaton displayed themselves in ‘fur gauntlet gloves, a cloth-of-gold tie, a scarlet jersey and Oxford bags’. In Brighton in the 1950s, queens wore ‘flared trousers, Hawaiian shirts, flamboyant hairdos, kerchiefs around their ...”

“... but on behalf of some imagined community of actors. As he seeks to express it first in a letter to Cecil Beaton, then in one to Edith Evans, the matter provides a near operatic occasion on which to delineate – in exasperated parenthetical gasps, like sobs – the very meaning of kinship: It’s so hard to say what I feel – to have let down the whole ...”