Bøger af Charlotte Bingham

You've seen PYGMALION? Or MY FAIR LADY perhaps? And if so, did you think there were a few questions left unanswered? Shaw did and supplied some answers to many of these questions in subsequent writings yet the question that begged most for an answer he left well up in the air. So here's a possible answer to that particular question and it's but no that might spoil your enjoyment. So why not just sit back and see what might have happened or maybe even did happen BELOW STAIRS........

This is the sequel to CHARLOTTE BINGHAM'S global best selling youthful autobiography CORONET AMONG THE WEEDS which was the a fiction sensation of the early 1960s, propelling the 19 year old author to international fame. The book became the part basis of the chart topping TV comedy series NON HONESTLY on LWTV and this the second volume became the other source. Both volumes are delightfully and often hilariously funny and earned rave reviews at the time from critics in over a dozen countries. Reading them you get the most wonderfully original picture of those now far off and more innocent times, and both CORONETS will surely earn their place in literary history.

Four friends gather regularly to play Bridge, a habit formed over the years, but sadly one of their number, Isobel, has been recently widowed and her oldest friend Vic is taking steps to try and rehabilitate the still grief struck Isobel against the counsel of her husband Jimmy who deems it all too early. Vic persists and when the play opens it is the first time Isobel has ventured out let alone sat at a cards table since losing her husband. But now there is a new face in the game, Hugh, who just happens to have known Isobel in her youth. Hugh is recently married to the seemingly quiet and well-ordered Mary, who turns out to be someone with quite a different agenda altogether, and as with Mary's help Isobel begins to find her emotional feet once more, the god of Disorder takes charge and mayhem emotional and physical ensues before chaos is banished and peace and normality return to everyone's lives as the cards are picked up once more as the game of life moves on. Although set around a bridge game, the play is nothing to do with the game itself but is about the characters who meet to play who have all known each other as it emerges for most of their lives. Far from being about cards the play is about love, friendship, loss, redemption and rehabilitation. For audience and cast alike it requires absolutely no knowledge of bridge at all, only an interest in humanity and how we all try and cope with the hardest hand of all to play - the loss of a loved one.

MUMS ON THE RUN tells the often hilarious story of Pat and Sam, two middle aged mothers, intent on fleeing hearth and home for a blissful, family free fortnight of drawing and cooking classes - only to end up at ramshackle and leaky old Hartley House where the ever resourceful Aunt Biddy has found herself quite inadvertently struggling to get her nephew Tom's life back on track by opening his only asset as a get away from it all idyllic country retreat. Add a Polish butler straight out of Dad's Army, a lovesick artist, and a succession of whacky guests and the Mums' joint intent on getting the most from their leisure time sees them ending up getting a lot more than the change they had bargained for...

The beautiful Lady Georgiana Longborough and her friend Jennifer Parker-Jones, 7th Marchioness of Pemberton, are finding life a little too dull in deepest Wilt-shire. Jennifer's answer to all her problems it seems is to give a Summer Ball. But the social life of the County Set is rarely if ever that straightforward, for while shopping for her ball gown Georgiana re-meets her first lover, Kaminski, the great and famous film director, while at the same time her aunt, the Countess - who is helping Jennifer arrange her ball - finds out that in fact Jennifer is bent on double crossing her. The Countess in turn plots to teach the young Marchioness a lesson - but will she be able to manage her revenge? Will Jennifer discover the true father of her buxom neighbour's children? Will Fulton - the gay husband of Lady Tizzy the buxom neighbour - ever manage to make Lady Tizzy stop straying? And will Bloss, Lord Pemberton's wily butler, manage to get his get his new car? Will life in Wiltshire ever be the same? Not as long as Charlotte Bingham's famously wonderful characters inhabit this neck of the rural woods.....

Biddy is still struggling to help nephew Tom make Hartley House a financial success. When Boris - their Polish handyman/butler - suggests they put in a swimming pool, Biddy reluctantly agrees. But the pool is not quite the attraction they had hoped - and so on Tom's suggestion, Biddy hires Aurora Feverfew, an expert in Anger Management. The course is an instant success, bringing to Hartley House a succession of problematic guests, some of whom prove so impossible finally Biddy herself ends up resolving to join them on the course......

Lady Georgiana Longborough has rejected a full-blooded life with her artist lover Augustus Hackett and instead has married the Scottish Lord Stranragh - who likes to address Georgiana was if she were a board meeting. Meanwhile down in Wiltshire, her fecund friend Jennifer's marriage to the Marquis of Pemberton seems in much better shape - except that Jennifer can never quite tell what 'Pember' is up to. A drink or two with the butler is one thing - but why is Bloss given a bigger car than Nanny? Fulton and Elliott, Jennifer's gay neighbours, are happily ensconced with the recently widowed ex-Bluebell girl Lady Tizzy, both of them blissfully content to play at fatherhood - always providing they know the parentage of Lady Tizzy's children. For pedigree is what it is all about, especially in the country set. But is the emotionally insecure Georgiana too thoroughbred to survive an elopement with Gus when she finds him back in her life? Has Jennifer the 'class' to rise above the village gossip? One thing is abundantly certain - in this world of social snakes and ladders, most of the protagonists will get what they richly deserve. 'Stylish....Charlotte Bingham distils high-class foibles into a classic lark.' COMPANY

The story takes place during a London Season. Georgiana is poor, posh and very beautiful. Jennifer is rich, middle-class and rather fat. They are both, as are all their contemporaries, in search of a marriage that will enrich or ennoble them. But Belgravia is much more than a romantic Comedy. It's a kind of cross between Vile Bodies and Love in a Cold Climate - a very funny book, full of wonderful characters, in line with all of Charlotte Bingham's works

Further adventures of the lives of characters first met in LOVE IN BELGRAVIA - dreary little Jennifer, now a seemingly permanently pregnant marchioness, beautiful but vexatious Georgiana who while recovering from her affair with a world famous film director now pretends to have a husband so that Gus her new working class artist lover won't insist on marrying her, louche and drunken Andrew Gillott now miserably married to Jennifer's dreadful socially aspiring mother Clarissa, and pretty Patti, ex-Bluebell girl who calls in Fulton and Elliott, the happily married gay interior decorators to swathe her new husband's knightly stately home in orange satin - characters equally wonderful and ghastly at the same time, and truly British from the bottom of their green wellies to the top of their Hermes headscarves.

'A Jilly Cooper heroine in a John le Carré world' (Libby Purves, TLS); a beguiling comic memoir about a young woman who discovers her father is a spy (and was the model for John le Carré's George Smiley) and goes to work as a secretary in 1950s MI5Much to her surprise, eighteen-year-old Lottie has just found out that her aloof, rather unexciting father is a spy. And now he's decreed that she must make herself useful and get a Proper Job - so she's packed off to MI5 herself, trussed up in a dreary suit. Luckily her delightful colleague Arabella is on hand to enliven the torments of typing and decode the enigmas of office life. But as Lottie's home fills with actors doubling as spies, and Arabella's mother is besieged with mysterious telephone calls, the girls start to feel well and truly spooked. A hilarious true story, and a unique window into 1950s Britain - where Russian agents infiltrate the highest echelons, where debutantes are typists and where Englishness is both a nationality and a code of behaviour - MI5 and Me is a sparkling comic memoir.

When Kathleen finds a mare in foal, despite the fact that she and her father can barely afford to feed her, they take her in. But as Kathleen has always feared The Enchanted must be sold. Rory James and his father take a chance on the little horse in the hope of improving the fortune of their run-down racing yard.

It is 1941, and England is at its lowest ebb, under-nourished, under-informed and terrified of imminent invasion. Even at Eden Park, the beautiful country estate where Poppy, Lily, Kate, Marjorie and her adopted brother Billy are working in espionage, confidence is at an all-time low.