Drusilla beyfus biography examples
Milton Shulman
Canadian author, film and theatre critic
Milton Shulman (1 September 1913 – 24 May 2004) was a Canadian author, film and theatre critic who was based in the United Kingdom from 1943.
Early life
Shulman was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of a successful shopkeeper. His parents were born in Ukraine and were driven out of the Russian Empire by poverty and anti-Jewish pogroms. Shulman's father was only 26 when he died of the flu epidemic but had already acquired three millinery shops as well as a men's haberdashery.
Shulman was educated at Harbord Collegiate, then spent four years at the University of Toronto. Although he wished to pursue a writing career, he was articled to a law firm, attending lectures at Osgoode Hall Law School for a further three years before being called to the Ontario bar just before World War II broke out in 1939.
War service
After the period called the " phoney war" , Shulman signed up for the Canadian army, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Canadian Armoured Corps and posted to England in June 1943. Stationed in London as a captain he was assigned to the secret operational intelligence unit MI 14b, dealing with the order of battle of the Wehrmacht's formations.
He joined Canadian Army HQ three months before D-Day as a major and by the war's end he was an intelligence officer with the First Canadian Army. While still in uniform, he interviewed many of the captured German generals in the following months and years including Gerd von Rundstedt and Kurt Meyer. As a result of these interviews, he wrote the Second World War military history Defeat in the West, published in London by Secker & Warburg in April 1947, and by Dutton in New York in January 1948. A paperback edition remains in print.
London career
Shulman joined the staff of the London Evening Standard in 1948 and, for over forty years, wrote about theatre, film, television and politics with sharp humour and irreverence.&# Drusilla Beyfus might be one of the longest-serving residents of Eaton Square, having moved to her first home there in the 1950s. Her future husband, the late Milton Shulman, a prominent Evening Standard theatre critic, had just left Canadian intelligence and was looking for somewhere to live. “We were both working for Lord Beaverbrook (who owned the Daily Express and Evening Standard) so got to know each other. He said he was looking for a flat,” says Beyfus. “I’d heard Eaton Square was being renovated and I suggested there.” Alexandra Shulman says that she had ‘no desire to write an autobiography’ — so instead she has written about her clothes, and given us some scintillating reading. For despite having edited British Vogue for 25 years, until she retired in 2017, Shulman’s relationship with fashion at times reads less like a love affair than a marital tiff. Take, for example, the bra, which is the subject of chapter three. ‘There’s a point in most women’s lives when shopping for bras is consigned to one of those special places in hell,’ Shulman writes, revealing that, aged 17, she gave up, and didn’t wear a bra again for 20 years. (‘It wasn’t anything to do with lofty feminist ideals but simply that I hated how they felt.’) She now owns 35 bras, but doesn’t ‘love a single one of them’. The bikini has also caused upsets (‘body hair and I have a negotiated relationship’); and a psychotherapist would have plenty to say about her relationship with hats: ‘I very rarely wear hats.Drusilla Beyfus – A Fashionable Life
Drusilla Beyfus is a journalist, author, broadcaster and tutor. A well-known commentator on modern manners, she has just written a book on the life of Givenchy. She talks to Lorna Davies about what she has in common with the French design icon, as well as her love of Belgravia.
Built in 1827, Eaton Square was damaged in 1941 during World War Two when bombs hit St Peter’s Church and killed its vicar, Austin Thompson. While other squares in London were mainly occupied by commercial and institutional bodies after the war ended four years later, Eaton Square remained almost wholly residential (there are still bomb shelters under the central gardens) and became one of the capital’s most fashionable addresses, which it remains today.
“Milton moved to a flat overlooking the square and was thrilled with it. Then we got married, I had a baby and we lived and worked there very happily. We needed somewhere bigger when I had my second daughter but the idea of moving away was just heartbreaking. Luckily we found this place and have been here since,” Beyfus explains from her living room overlooking the leafy square.
Beyfus’s home, which she has lived in since 1960, has stunning views of her beloved trees on both sides and is filled with memorabilia, pictures and literature – some of which is written by herself or a member of her media-savvy family. “My husband said we’re an epidemic because there are so Document 1 of 1Hubert de Givenchy the man who shaped the Sixtie.docx