David Jays
A Romanian in Bohemia
Dinu Grigorescu – ‘Romanian by birth, French by choice and English by accident’ – recalls a tale of lost love. He is close to sixty and close to death in his Marylebone flat, but takes us back to his gorgeous youth (he looks, we’re repeatedly told, like Rudolf Valentino) in 1920s Paris. As the 19-year-old son of a moneybags businessman, he was sent there from Bucharest to gain polish, indulge his literary ambitions and lose his cherry in the traditional fashion amid la vie de Bohème.
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Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.
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James Hogg—best known today for his amazing novel The Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which “voluptuously tormented” André Gide—died #OTD, 21 Nov, 1835.
In this @Lit_Review article, Alan Taylor visits Hogg’s birthplace in the Borders
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-ettrick-shepherd