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Loading... Oh, What a Lovely Century: One man's marvellous adventures in love, war and high societyby Roderic Fenwick Owen
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I knew Roddy from 1988 but unfortunately he has been poorly served by this abridger of his diaries. The book is around 200pp too long and needlessly padded out with irrelevant and franky boring information, especially the latter half. Roddy led a fascinating life and a skilled biographer could have made much better use of his voluminous diaries. ( ) This is the abridged version of the author's autobiography - a million words reduced to a mere 566 pages, which is probably enough. Roderick Fenwick Owen (RFO) lived quite the life, travelling extensively in the middle part of the 20th century, having some remarkable experiences and meeting a host of interesting/famous characters - a year married to a Tahitian 'princess' and time spent as court poet to the ruler of Abu Dhabi, just a the oil boom was getting under way, stand out. However, the leitmotif that runs throughout is RFO's preoccupation with sex. He views most contacts through a sexual lens, never hesitating to recount and muse over this or that aspect of an encounter. Various liaisons with women but also frequent visits to Turkish Baths and long-term gay relationships pepper this highly spiced volume. Still, the adventures, insights and (it seems) ruthless honesty of RFO's life story make for a rollicking read. no reviews | add a review
'I would be most unhappy to think that any part of this memoir should be cut on grounds of 'decency', for those bits are essential...' So begins the lively true story of aristocrat and travel writer Roderic Fenwick-Owen. Born in 1920, Fenwick-Owen had an extraordinary life, which careered between some of the biggest moments in history and took him to the ends of the earth, meeting (and even living with) some of the 20th Century's most well-known people along the way, including Eisenhower, Jackson Pollock and Marlene Dietrich. After eye-opening schoolboy exploits with his classmates Christopher Lee and Queen Elizabeth II's cousin (whilst his father ran away with the family's nanny), Roderic spent the 1930s trying to fit in at Eton and Oxford and getting into various mischief all the while. In the summer of 1939, he witnessed Nazi Germany when he went to stay with a friend, and only managed to get home the day before war broke out. He served first in the ambulance service in the north of England and then in air raid shelters during the Blitz, before joining the RAF and being stationed in Italy. In the years afterwards he travelled far and wide, was briefly married to a Tahitian princess and became the court poet to Sheikh Shakhbut in Abu Dhabi. Dripped throughout his life are his numerous and passionate love affairs with both men and women, and the effects the decriminalisation of the former had on his happiness. Oh, What a Lovely Century is a marvellous obituary of an ever-changing and now lost world, that was frequently the best of times, and sometimes the worst. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)941.082092History and Geography Europe British Isles Historical periods of British Isles 1837- Period of Victoria and House of Windsor 1901-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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