David Jays

A Romanian in Bohemia

The Prince's Boy

By

Bloomsbury 152pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

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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