GOSSIPY INSIDER’S TALES OF HIGH LIFE
“SUDDENLY I am old,” writes the journalist and novelist Angela Huth, author of the best-seller Land Girls.
She was born in 1938, the daughter of the director and producer Harold Huth and his wife Bridget. While Angela adored her charming father, her mother was “bored stiff by small children”, leaving Angela and her sister Trish to be looked after by a devoted nanny, who did her best to conceal their mother’s penchant for gin: “Oh dear, poor mummy fell down the stairs last night.”
Haphazardly educated at a girls’ boarding school where she had the good luck to be taught by a brilliant English teacher, Miss Dillon-Weston, Angela studied art in Paris and Italy before returning “to face the dotty business of becoming a debutante”. A longing to write led her in 1959 to Queen Magazine, where she met the brilliant, acerbic journalist Quentin Crewe, who would become her first husband. An intensely glamorous Bohemian social life ensued, with friends including David Frost, the poet John Betjeman and Princess Margaret, who shared Huth’s unusual phobia about dolls.
Deliciously gossipy and amusingly trenchant, this is an entertaining “collection of stories from times past”.
|