CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
It’s My Privilege: Glorious Memoirs by the Very Rich
A look back at a time when the super-wealthy felt they had nothing to lose by letting readers inside their gilded corridors.
“Class consciousness takes a vacation while we’re in the thrall of this book,” Barbara Grizzuti Harrison wrote in the Book Review in 1985, in her evaluation of the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt’s memoir “Once Upon a Time.” To be clear, Harrison was referring to the class consciousness of the reader, not the author. Vanderbilt demonstrates perfect awareness throughout her book that most young children don’t play with emerald tiaras and alligator jewel boxes lined in chestnut satin, or rely on the services of multiple butlers, or lose count of their own houses. Harrison’s point was that Vanderbilt’s talent with a pen — and perspective on her own economic altitude — allowed consumers of her tale to suspend their envy and engage with the reality of growing up in opulent neglect.
Memoirs by the rich have always been major publishing events. Readers love to prowl wide-eyed through gilded corridors, and I am no exception. A cherished portion of my shelf is devoted to the self-accounts of Rothschilds, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Pells, Guggenheims and other names familiar from banks, art museums and city centers.
Chess history has been made: aged just eight, Bodhana Sivanandan totalled a remarkable 8.5/13 against a field of highly rated grandmasters, international masters and experts.
FT.COM
Aged just eight, Bodhana Sivanandan enters chess history
Plus: in this week’s puzzle — can you find White’s hidden win?
HARD FORK
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The Great Read
He Made a Magazine, 95 Issues, While Hiding From the Nazis in an Attic
The people who hid Curt Bloch, a German Jew, gave him both food and the materials he needed to make a highly creative magazine now drawing attention.
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