Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

An ongoing digital archive of 1,364 items (and counting) proving that I read, I saw, and I actually paid attention.

Category is

Book

  • The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy

    by Evelyn Waugh

    “Who asked you to the funeral anyway? Were you acquainted with the late parrot?”

  • “‘Every member of the audience,’ marvelled one visitor, ‘had a listening-tube, hung on the back of the seat in front, with a pair of little knobs that you placed in your ears; at the other end of the listening-tube a phonograph played a text synchronized with the pictures.’”

  • “In only a decade, homosexuals had graduated from criminals—merely incarcerated after homosexual activity—to mentally ill criminals subject to psychiatric remedies, which included shock therapy, castration, and lobotomies.”

  • Class with the Countess: How to Live with Elegance and Flair

    by Countess LuAnn de Lesseps

    “Elegance can most certainly be acquired. You don’t have to be rich and famous to have an unforgettable presence.”

  • Misia: The Life of Misia Sert

    by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale

    “I have many letters from Proust that I’ve never bothered to open…Anybody want them?”

  • Flâneur: The Art of Wandering The Streets of Paris

    by Federico Castigliano

    “Paris is narcotic for a man alone, a never-ending labyrinth where the anxiety of freedom is relieved.”

  • R.S.V.P.: Elsa Maxwell’s Own Story

    by Elsa Maxwell

    “Nothing spoils a good party like a genius.”

  • The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America

    by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois

    “A few months into the run, the woman who gave me my massage on Fridays before the show said, ‘It’s the weirdest thing. You seem to be developing wing muscles.’ Because there were these ridges of muscle I’d developed alongside my spine where I flexed the wings, opening and closing them.”

  • The Plague

    by Albert Camus (translated by Stuart Gilbert)

    “I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.”

  • The Stonewall Reader

    Edited by the New York Public Library

    “The queens took the lead in the Stonewall Riots. They walked around in semi-drag with teased hair and false eyelashes on and they didn’t give a shit what anybody thought about them. What did they have to lose? Absolutely fucking nothing.”

  • Cole Porter: A Biography

    by Charles Schwartz

    “Cole discovered that candy vendors sold more than sweets. They were also the purveyors of those spicy, naughty books that have always been the forbidden fruit of young people. Cole soon made a point of stocking up on these books.”

  • “In the way he dressed, fancy-dress parties and leopard-skin togas aside, Rex was markedly and increasingly conservative in comparison to his dandyish friends. Stephen might sprinkle his hair with gold dust, rouge his cheeks, smear Vaseline on his eyelids, paint his lips, don earrings and mist himself with scents from Worth and Molyneux, but for the most part (despite his brief flirtation with plus fours) Rex dressed ‘unostentatiously’ in corduroy trousers or well-cut suits.”

  • “The gleaming low white villa was set into the rocks behind it, as though it belonged there, and guests who glanced out of the windows or stepped onto the private balcony of their bedroom would get the impression that it was almost hanging over the blue sea. The swimming pool, considered the best on the Riviera, was housed in a basin blasted out of the rocks and featured a water-chute so that bathers could slide down into the sea below and swim to a raft tethered just offshore. The huge terrace between the house and the pool was the center for most of the entertainment, and at each end a curved stone staircase descended to the pool.”

  • A Handful of Dust

    by Evelyn Waugh

    “It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.”

  • “This is a characteristic image from the Bright Young People’s world: the thought of sorrowing in sunlight, good times gone, the myriad champagne corks bobbing away on a stream turned unexpectedly chill.”

  • “I figured the only way to make people love me was to be a million laughs.”

  • “The evening of Wednesday, November 28, 1973, as guests began arriving at Versailles, the palace glowed under a full moon and through a scrim of light snow—the first dusting of the season. Red uniformed, saber-wielding gendarmes flanked the gilded palace gates, along with some four hundred footmen in eighteenth-century white powdered wigs and livery. Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, dressed in green, ostrich-trimmed gown by Yves Saint Laurent and with solitary diamonds pinned in her thick hair greeted guests; brushing kisses on the cheeks of the French and offering handshakes to the Americans.”

  • Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant

    by Philip Hoare

    “Well, some men, I think, do want to look pretty. And nicer still, beautiful!”

  • Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity

    by Robert Beachy

    “The men in the bar—there were no women—came from all walks of life and included tradesmen, merchants, and professionals. What drew them to Seeger’s Restaurant was the opportunity to meet men who preferred men, for love or sociability, and to do so in a safe environment.”