The Rainbow Comes and Goes

Description

The first volume of Diana Cooper's witty, gossipy and sparkling autobiography - the perfect evocation of a bygone age. Lady Diana Cooper was a star of the early twentieth stage, screen and social scene. This first instalment of her sparkling autobiography tells of her upbringing, her beautiful artistic mother and aristocratic father, her debut into high society and the glittering parties - 'dancing and extravagance and lashing of wine, and charades and moonlit balconies and kisses' - which were interrupted with the outbreak of the First World War. This volume ends with Diana's marriage to the 'love of her life', diplomat and politician Duff Cooper.

Lady Diana Cooper was born on 29 August 1892. She married Alfred Duff Cooper, DSO, who became one of the Second Word War's key politicians. Her startling beauty resulted in her playing the lead in two silent films and then Max Reinhardt's The Miracle. In 1944, following the Liberation of Paris, the couple moved into the British Embassy in Paris. They then retired to a house at Chantilly just outside Paris. After Duff's death in 1954 Diana remained there till 1960, when she moved back to London. She died in 1986.

A delightful memoir -- Juliet Nicolson * Sunday Telegraph Magazine * Poetic, idiosyncratic, poignant, funny, unflagging, scintillating, simple, stylish; not the book of the season, or of the bedside table; a book...to be read and reread and loved for a lifetime. -- Evelyn Waugh Lady Diana was no ordinary upper-class English rose: She was perhaps the first person from such a background to go on the stage, wowing audiences on both sides of the Atlantic * Washington Times * Admired and adored as a classic beauty and first-division socialite during the frivolous Twenties and Thirties, Lady Diana was one of the last survivors of the set which revolved around the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson * The Times * One of the glittering social personalities of an era of wealth and privilege, combining as she did exceptional grace and beauty with verve and a nature of deep and intense feeling * The Times *