Jason Goowin reviews the memoirs of John Julius Norwich
In 1957 John Julius Cooper (later Norwich) was keeping open house in Beirut, ‘the Clapham Junction of the world’s air routes’.Guests were given dinner on the terrace, where the Coopers liked to watch their faces ‘as, promptly at ten minutes past nine, an immense, luminous grapefruit appeared from behind Sannine and climbed slowly up into the eastern sky’.
JJ’s passions — for history, for Venice, for music — have always been enlivened by a sense of theatre: his...
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