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From: Remi Category: Books Date: 20 November 2006 Time: 06:13 PM Review: In the grand ol' summer of 2001, I was perusing some books in a Southern California thrift store when I came across this writer's book on Provence. This was while the thrift lady was telling me how her National Geographic collection helped her son's homework on Mali. I walked away and read it on the plane, and enjoyed it greatly. The style, the panache, the atmosphere. It was all there. Those cunning little quotations that remove me briefly from the text so better to admire the landscape. I felt that I learnt not only about Provence, which let's face it I could have done with an out-dated Fodor, but I experienced tender evocations of another world, partly imagined, partly real. After seeing 'The Good Year', and with my sister's family more firmly ensconced down South, my thoughts returned to Pope-Hennessy. I googled him and amazoned him, and was saddened to learn that he died in 1974 while engaging in 'rough trade' I learnt from an unauthorised website. Suddenly, everything that seemed magical and neverlandish about my man became tragic and miserable. He didn't write any other books along the lines of the one I found, mainly biographies. And why did he spend all his time being an editor for The Spectator? Why didn't he write at least another little gem for me, something I could dream about while in bed, and as the waves lollop on the pebbly shore outside I imagine what he was doing in those last years, what TV he watched, what he ate, all les choses de la vie. I will try and gain something else from him, I don't want to believe that's all there is.