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Martin Sharp's art was as singular as his style. He blurred the
boundaries of high art and low with images of Dylan, Hendrix and
naked flower children that defined an era. Along the way the
irreverent Australian was charged with obscenity and collaborated
with Eric Clapton as he drew rock stars and reprobates into his
world. In this richly told and beautifully written biography, Joyce
Morgan captures the loneliness of a privileged childhood, the heady
days of the underground magazine Oz as well as the exuberant
creativity of Swinging London and beyond. Sharp pursued his
quixotic dream to realise van Gogh's Yellow House in Australia. He
obsessively championed eccentric singer Tiny Tim and was haunted by
Sydney's Luna Park. Charismatic and paradoxical, he became a
recluse whose phone never stopped ringing. There was no one like
Martin Sharp. When he died, he was described as a stranger in a
strange land who left behind a trail of stardust.
She was 'amused, cynical, ironic, loving, gay, ferocious, cold,
ardent but never gentle'. She was a whirlwind. She created around
her the atmosphere of a Court at which her friends were either in
disgrace or favour, a butt or a blessing. Elizabeth von Arnim may
have been born on the shores of Sydney Harbour, but it was in
Victorian London that she discovered society and society discovered
her. She made her Court debut before Queen Victoria at Buckingham
Palace, was pursued by a Prussian count and married into the formal
world of the European aristocracy. It was the novels she wrote
about that life that turned her into a literary sensation on both
sides of the Atlantic and had her likened to Jane Austen. Her
marriage to the count produced five children but little happiness.
Her second marriage to Bertrand Russell's brother was a disaster.
But by then she had captivated the great literary and intellectual
circles of London and Europe. She brought into her orbit the likes
of Nancy Astor, Lady Maud Cunard, her cousin Katherine Mansfield
and other writers such as E.M. Forster, Somerset Maugham and H.G.
Wells, with whom it was said she had a tempestuous affair.
Elizabeth von Arnim was an extraordinary woman who lived during
glamorous, exciting and changing times that spanned the innocence
of Victorian Sydney and finished with the march of Hitler through
Europe. Joyce Morgan brings her to vivid and spellbinding life.
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