Elisabeth luard biography of williams

Trained as shorthand typists, we were considered temporary, pending marriage and babies. Among the new growth was Private Eye, founded on 25th October When Andy suggested I help out with the secretaries at a fledgling Private Eye for a fiver a week, that suited me just fine. My employers at the Eye, installed rent-free up a narrow staircase in a warehouse in Covent Garden stacked with paperback copies of P G Wodehouse, were young, clever, schoolboyish and apparently uninterested in sprinting round the furniture.

The first editor, Christopher Booker — endearingly bespectacled and kind to the office help — provided the campaigning journalism. Willie Rushtonportly and jovial, did the scissor and pasting for the printer, and drew the cartoons. I, as Elisabeth Longmore, was called Lizzie Longpants reason unknown, at least by me. The rest — the stories and jokes that defined the mag — were the business of Richard Ingrams, saintly founder of The Oldie born in and happily still with uswho took over as editor in when Booker unwisely went on holiday.

And he always wore the same saggy-pocketed, corduroy jacket at a time when Carnaby Street was dressing dandies in frilly shirts and velvet bell-bottoms. Girls are naturally shallow — they notice these things. Secretaries typed up hand-scrawled copy on an Olivetti manual, wrote the invoices, made the tea and, when push came to shove, sold the mag on the street.

Nor could the men, except Booker with two fingers. The Establishment, like Private Eye, opened in While Private Eye and The Establishment looked like natural allies, the Eye thought The Establishment a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals and I later learned The Establishment considered the Eye a gang of overgrown schoolboys.

Elisabeth luard biography of williams: Full of anecdotes and peppered

He followed and proposed. She was just twenty-one when they married. Luard's fascinating, witty and often brave memoir charts forty years of marriage to a man who was as cavalier and unreliable as he was charismatic and charming. Good-looking and athletic, with a keen intelligence and a deep understanding of and love for women, Nicholas Luard was also an absentee father, a philanderer, a wheeler-dealer whose numerous harebrained business schemes usually lost rather than made money, and ultimately a man whose love of the bottle was all-consuming.

But while life with Nicholas was never going to be easy, it was also never going to be dull. In My Life as a Wife, award-winning writer Elisabeth Luard tells the story of her life with this hugely glamorous and extraordinary maverick of a man.

Elisabeth luard biography of williams: I'm a writer, illustrator

It is a journey littered with numerous eccentric friends and innumerable escapades, often staying just ahead of the bank, through to the grim days of her husband's terrifying descent into alcoholism and insanity, his liver transplant and ultimately his death. Yet this is a story of laughter and hope as well as sadness - the healing power of children, the comfort of the kitchen table, the delight of good food and the simple joy of making life work - written by a woman of spirit.

Paperback published AprilBloomsbury. Family life is never easy - there's the best of it and the worst, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

Elisabeth luard biography of williams: Looking for books by Elisabeth Luard?

And then the children grow up and you're on your own, just the two of you, if your marriage has managed to survive fortune's slings and arrows. These are the middle years, the time of exploring new worlds, a world beyond the family. She worked at the satirical magazine Private Eye where she met and married the proprietor, Nicholas Luardin They had four children.

This article about a writer or poet from the United Kingdom is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Born in London during WW2, my toddler food-memories are of dried bananas and powdered eggs - yuck. My father died in the war, leaving a two-year-old and a baby - me. Primary school in Montevideo taught me to read, write and think in Spanish I already spoke French, the diplomatic language.