For nearly half a century, Sir Roy Strong has enjoyed a high public
profile in the arts world in Britain. Yet remarkably little is
known about his life before the Swinging Sixties when he burst upon
the scene as the revolutionary trendy young director of the
National Portrait Gallery, aged thirty-one. In this book he
recounts for the first time the story of his social origins and the
roots of his life-long passion for the culture and history of
England. He describes his childhood home in a suburban North London
terrace, revealing himself to have been a shy solitary child of
melancholy temperament, painting Elizabethan miniatures and
Shakespearean set designs in his teens. It follows him through
grammar school and university, where together with a generation of
postwar 'meritocrats' like A.S. Byatt and Alan Bennett, his passion
for learning was awakened and nourished. We catch glimpses of
seminal experiences, such as his first outings to the theatre,
opera and ballet, and his first trip abroad to Italy, which was to
have a lasting influence on his sensibilities. He explores key,
sometimes painful relationships with his family, his school teacher
with whom he had a lifelong correspondence, and his debt to such
people as C.V. Wedgwood, A.L. Rowse, Frances Yates and Cecil
Beaton. In it we glimpse a vanished world dominated by class and
hierarchy up which he climbed. As a backdrop we have the
transformation of London from the drab, postwar world of the 1950s
to the epicentre of fashion in the 1960s, and the development of
Sir Roy's distinctive sartorial style, inspired by the burgeoning
shops on Carnaby Street. Richly illustrated with drawings, letters,
photographs and other archival material, this is an honest and
compelling portrait of a young man about to step into the limelight
of the British cultural scene he helped to modernize and in which
he played a leading role.
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