I can\u2019t resist a courtroom drama. Prince Harry vs the press, for example: journalists I admire on one side, aggrieved celebrities on the other. Among the usual suspects I have a fondness for Elizabeth Hurley. When I was editor of Tatler, she gamely posed for the cover in a satin gown in a breezy field with a friendly goat in tow, with a coverline assuring our readers that people had better sex in the country. The logic escapes me, but the issue sold extremely well.<\/p>\n
Trials can drag on, though. I was once sent to cover a libel trial: Imran Khan had accused two cricketers of ball-tampering. Hours passed as they fought about gravel, and I played noughts and crosses with the commentator Henry Blofeld. There was one blissful interlude: elegant Charles Gray QC, a silver fox with old-style Foreign Office charm, asked a South African-born cricketer, in expectation of a hearty denial, if he would ever condone ball tampering. \u2018Condone it? Of course I condone it!\u2019 the sporty chap bellowed out in his broad accent, with all the energy of a charging rhinoceros. The press box woke up and Gray shouted, \u2018You mean CONDEMN, I believe\u2019 to deliver a boundary save.<\/p>\n
The courtroom drama playing out in the background of my book, The Renoir Girls, is the Dreyfus affair, the saga in France where the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus was accused of treason on false evidence and the whole country took one side or the other. The Dreyfusards were politicians, journalists, novelists, most famously \u00c9mile Zola. But the affair impacted everyone, including the subjects of my book, the Cahen d\u2019Anvers sisters, one of several Jewish dynasties who have vanished from France. The divisiveness was fuelled by cartoons depicting Jews as animals, puppet masters, complete with blood libel and the like. It fed into a stream which became a river, then a Niagara of venom during the Vichy regime.<\/p>\n
The Cahen d\u2019Anvers sisters were painted by Renoir in the 1880s and their mother was a belle of the Belle \u00c9poque. My fascination with that period began more than 20 years ago, over a lunch with Princess Priscilla Bibesco in her first-floor apartment, decorated in pale aquamarine, on the tip of the \u00cele Saint-Louis; you could look out over the Seine, with the feeling of being on the prow of a ship. Priscilla was Marcel Proust\u2019s goddaughter. (Her father was the model for Proust\u2019s aristocratic Saint-Loup.) Proust died when Priscilla was two, but wrote of her: \u2018It is in this little girl that all that we know now continues.\u2019 Sometimes history is like that \u2013 faraway but also so near you can touch it.<\/p>\n
Art has the same ability to dissolve time, to provide an immediate connection with the past. I return to Paris for the opening at the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay of Renoir and Love, which arrives at the National Gallery in October. Some images are so familiar that only the actual canvas can restore their luminous originality. In \u2018Luncheon of the Boating Party\u2019, I spy Charles Ephrussi, art critic and lover of the Renoir Girls\u2019 mother. He is the collector in Edmund de Waal\u2019s The Hare with Amber Eyes and at the centre of the DNA mystery in my book, though I won\u2019t provide my own spoiler.<\/p>\n
During a weekend in Kent, we visit the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate. But another exhibition nearby is getting more attention: the daubs of Matthew Collings. Inside a small rented space (a fraction of your average Gail\u2019s), three women sit on plastic chairs selling keffiyehs. In the drawings, Blu-Tacked to the wall, here it is again: prominent Jews pulling puppet strings or eating babies, Stars of David everywhere, blamed for terrible events for which they bear no responsibility. Politicians come under fire too: Morgan McSweeney has Keir Starmer in a net. The gashes of red crayon resemble a twisted art show in a nursery, though Collings compares himself to Rembrandt, a fellow \u2018scribbler who arrives at stuff\u2019. The anti-Semitic cartoonists of the Dreyfus era at least learned to draw.<\/p>\n
Margate is heaving with hipsters, but other parts of the Kent coast resolutely refuse to play the game. Broadstairs (charming) is full of caf\u00e9s that, in time-honoured English style, shut at 3 p.m. Dickens\u2019s holiday home, the inspiration for Bleak House, is now a caf\u00e9 too. Nearby is a grumpy plaque on a cottage: \u2018Charles Dickens never lived here.\u2019 Last came our quest for John Buchan\u2019s 39 steps. After much investigation a local tells us: \u2018The trouble is, they aren\u2019t the original steps, there aren\u2019t 39 of them, and they\u2019re on private land so you can\u2019t see them anyway.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I can\u2019t resist a courtroom drama. Prince Harry vs the press, for example: journalists I admire on one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":595477,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":{"0":"post-595476","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-australia","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/595477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}