Full steam ahead for cruise line
Off the back of Cunard’s announcement that the latest addition to its fleet will be called Queen Anne, the operator has more news.
Off the back of Cunard’s announcement that the latest addition to its fleet will be called Queen Anne, the cruise line has named celebrity chef Matt Moran as the headline act on a five-day food-focused return voyage from Sydney.
The Great Australian Culinary Voyage on Queen Elizabeth will depart on January 28 next year, sailing south to Melbourne and Burnie in Tasmania before returning to the Emerald City. Fares start from $1309 a person, twin-share, for an inside cabin, but Britannia Balcony staterooms (from $1799) allow you to feel the sea breeze in your hair. The full itinerary, along with additional talent, is yet to be revealed but Cunard is promising a packed schedule of dinners, demonstrations and onshore excursions to sample some of the country’s finest produce, meet the makers and learn about Indigenous ingredients.
Dining options on Queen Elizabeth include the formal Britannia Restaurant, the more casual Lido and the Princess Grill (pictured), exclusive to Princess Grill Suite passengers. Speciality restaurant Steakhouse at The Verandah is the spot for meatlovers.
The first sailings of Queen Anne, named for the British monarch who reigned from 1702 until her death in 1714, will take place in early 2024, with fares going on sale this May. The ship’s launch will represent the first time since 1999 that Cunard has had four vessels sailing concurrently.
PENNY HUNTER
Book club
THE PARIS BOOKSELLER
Kerri Maher
Ask for directions to Shakespeare and Co in Paris and you’d be sent to 37 rue de la Bucherie on the Left Bank and perhaps the doors would be shut. The present owner Sylvia Whitman, daughter of George Whitman, who opened the bookstore in 1951, has had to press the French government for assistance during the past two years of Covid closures. It’s a sad postscript to the legacy of Sylvia Beach, who founded her first English-language bookstore and lending library of the same name in 1919, at 8 rue Dupuytren in St Germain-de-Pres. It was to become a sanctuary where French customers tapped into the post-war generation of US and British authors and expatriates met to socialise and spread literary-world gossip.
It’s that first Sylvia, the original Paris bookseller, who’s the subject of this enthralling blend of historic references and imagined scenarios, especially the intimate relationship between Beach and her Parisian partner, Adrienne Monnier (to whom she was drawn “as if by sirens”). The bookshops respectively owned by the women in the 1920s were eventually located across from each other on rue de l’Odeon (fondly dubbed Stratford-on-Odeon).
Kerri Maher’s descriptions are drenched in detail and striding through the pages are the towering likes of Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, “grande dame Gertrude Stein” and, especially, James Joyce, whose “obscene” and ultimately inescapable novel Ulysses was championed and first published by Beach, in 1922, a gesture of her bravery that led to utter anguish. But the story belongs, too, to Paris’s bohemian demi-monde in the early decades of the 20th century, all intriguingly realised by Maher, whose author’s note explains her research process and primary sources (including Beach’s papers, held at Princeton University Library) and provides a neat postscript to events after 1936, the year the book ends. These disclosures allayed my suspicions that The Paris Bookseller relies too much on imagination and speculation, especially the intricately described connections between characters. I now concede it’s a fitting homage to Beach, awarded a knight of the Legion of Honour in 1937, seven years before the liberation of Paris when Hemingway strode down rue de l’Odeon to “liberate Shakespeare and Company”.
SUSAN KUROSAWA
Spend it
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SUSAN KUROSAWA