SPRING PAGE-TURNERS
As we enter a new season, Jennifer McShane chooses the must-read fiction titles and co ee table tomes that deserve a place on your reading list.
Best reads
Glamour: 30 Years of Women Who Have Reshaped the World (Abrams, approx €35, out now) by Irish editor Samantha Barry and others is a tribute to the magazine’s much-lauded Glamour annual Women of the Year Awards. Every year, they encapsulate and honour some of the most extraordinary women of our time, from activists to actors to political gures – all strong, ambitious women that, rightfully, should take centre stage.
Launched in 1990, the annual awards have become a 30-year living, breathing, now printed-history event, mapping out the evolution of women’s power across the worlds of film, music, politics, sport, business, real life communities and more. Quite simply, their aim is to inspire women and girls around the world to strive for and achieve momentous change. Many of the names are more than familiar to us now. We’ve grown up with
Billie Jean King, Madonna, Nora Ephron, Hillary Clinton, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Titans of change like Greta Thunberg, Michelle Obama, and Malala Yousafzai have rocked the status quo in lasting ways in modern times, while stars such as Reese Witherspoon, Ava DuVernay, Julianne Moore, Lupita Nyong’o and Ashley Graham have used their global influence to shift the needle in filmmaking, reproductive rights, criminal justice and diversity. For all these reasons and more, they warrant a place in the book.
Glamour’s Women of the Year also touches on some of the most culturally important moments of our recent history. It brings to life the voices of winners past and present, including short essays from Glamour editors-in-chief, charting how the landscape has changed and expanded. Most importantly, the book o ers inspiration and service, reminding today’s women and girls that, in the words of the 2015
Women of the Year winner Reese Witherspoon, “ambition is not a dirty word”.
Edward Quinn, or Ted, as he was fondly called, was born in Dublin in 1920. Open and impressionable, he held various jobs, including a stint at the RAF as a radio navigator during the second World War, before moving to Tangiers, where he worked for an airline. He married his Swiss-born wife, Gret Sulser, in 1948 before moving the following year with Gret to Monaco – a fortunate decision that would shape his career and life. Starting in the 1950s, he lived and worked as a photographer on the Côte d’Azur, which was a “playground for celebrities” from the world of showbiz and art during what was deemed the golden fties. It was here – on the Riviera – that the famous stars of the screen came to relax. Quinn was in the right place at the right time, managing to capture enchanting images documenting the charm and chic of a legendary era. It’s these images which make up his Riviera Cocktail (teNeues,
approx €50, out now), a collection of beautifully captured portraits of famous faces we know so well. Quinn was known to be unobtrusive and ever-so-slightly impetuous, and it’s for this reason that every shot looks almost completely natural – so familiar yet so new. For every portrait of Grace Kelly, for example, looking so composed, there are many shots of her laughing, her face animated and all the more beautiful for it. Or what of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton looking relaxed and impossibly glamorous as they stroll down a sidewalk in conversation? It’s this re-capturing of intimate moments that makes Quinn’s work so compelling to view. is is a perfect tome for fans who want another glimpse of the glitz and glamour of Hollywood.