Terribly Intimate Portraits

Noël Coward was never one to let a bit of accuracy get in the way of a good time. This collection of character portraits, some historical and some imagined, finds the great playwright defending his "research" against tiresome critics with magnificently theatrical outrage. The jest is the whole point: Coward knows full well he's making it up, and he wants you to know it too. The portraits themselves are miniature fireworks: Julie de Poopinac, beauty and wit at court; Madcap Moll, the Duchess of Wapping, whose adventurous spirit scandalized an entire borough. Coward captures not what happened, but what ought to have happened, the essence and spirit of his subjects rendered in prose that fizzes with mischief. It's biography as music hall, history as a cheeky wink. For readers who like their wit served with a side of swagger and their portraits terribly, deliberately improper.