@article{1389045,
      recid = {1389045},
      author = {Zinovieff, Sofka,},
      title = {The mad boy, Lord Berners, my grandmother and me /},
      pages = {xii, 436 pages :},
      abstract = {Faringdon House in Oxfordshire was the home of Lord  Berners, composer, writer, painter, friend of Stravinsky  and Gertrude Stein, a man renowned for his eccentricity --  masks, practical jokes, a flock of multi-coloured doves --  and his homosexuality. Before the war he made Faringdon an  aesthete's paradise, where exquisite food was served to  many of the great minds, beauties and wits of the day.  Since the early thirties his companion there was Robert  Heber-Percy, twenty-eight years his junior, wildly  physical, unscholarly, a hothead who rode naked through the  grounds, loved cocktails and nightclubs, and was known to  all as the Mad Boy. If the two men made an unlikely couple,  at a time when homosexuality was illegal, the addition to  the household in 1942 of a pregnant Jennifer Fry, a high  society girl known to be 'fast', as Robert's wife was  simply astounding. After Victoria was born the marriage  soon foundered (Jennifer later married Alan Ross). Berners  died in 1950, leaving Robert in charge of Faringdon, aided  by a ferocious Austrian housekeeper who strove to keep the  same culinary standards in a more austere age. This was the  world Sofka Zinovieff, Victoria's daughter, a typical child  of the sixties, first encountered at the age of seventeen.  Eight years later, to her astonishment, Robert told her he  was leaving her Faringdon House. Her book about Faringdon  and its people is marvellously witty and full of insight,  bringing to life a vanished world and the almost  fantastical people who lived in it.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1389045},
}