Can never spend too much time looking at his life.
A twentieth-century photographer, artist, writer and designer for more than fifty years, Cecil Beaton was at the center of the worlds of fashion, society, theater and film. This book brings together for the first time the never-before-published diaries from 1970 to 1980 and, unlike the six slim volumes of diaries published during his lifetime, these have been left uniquely unedited. Hugo Vickers, the executor of Beaton’s estate and the author of his acclaimed biography, has added extensive notes that are as lively as the diary entries themselves.

Here is the photographer for British and American Vogue, designer of the sets and costumes for the play and film My Fair Lady and the film Gigi, with a cast of characters from many worlds, at shooting parties in the English countryside, on yachts, at garden parties at Buckingham Palace, at costume balls in Venice, Paris or London.

Beaton began as an outsider and “developed the power to observe, first with his nose pressed up against the glass,” and later from within inner circles. Vickers has said, “His eagle eye missed nothing.” The Unexpurgated Beaton is not only a great read and wicked fun, but also a timeless chronicle of our age.

Although in his lifetime Cecil Beaton - royal photographer and theatrical designer - published six short volumes of his diaries, he was shy of hurting the feelings of those he wrote about. Hugo Vickers has gone back to the originals to produce the Beaton diaries as they were written. Beaton records a vigorous social life among hostesses such as Emerald Cunard and Sybil Colefax, performers including Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich, as well as artists from Cocteau and Picasso to Bacon and the young Hockney. Running through the diaries are his friendships with the Queen Mother, with Diana Cooper and Greta Garbo. In the unexpurgated edition Vickers shows what Beaton really had to say about those with whom he worked. He could be waspish, even brutal. His diaries are frank and uninhibited. ( )

Can never spend too much time looking at his life. ( )