My personal style signifier is a beret, something I have worn for decades. Good berets are hard to source. Often the simplest ones are best. It comes down to how they hold their form. Not long ago I went on a quest to find the perfect beret and bought some fine ones from Laulhère in Paris. Apart from that, I tend to wear black jackets and white shirts. I rarely wear ties. I believe one can be simultaneously elegant and free, classical and romantic.
The last thing I bought and loved was Girl, a painting by the Nigerian artist Muraina Oyelami. I acquired it at an absent auction at Bonhams. I loved its colours. It seemed to me exquisite and small, just right for a wall in my flat. When I finally saw the painting I was alarmed at how large it was. It is the portrait of a girl on a farm, but its energy, its form, achieves much more: it becomes the portrait of a culture – nostalgic, calm and contemplative. Now it dominates my living room with a gentle, colourful, feminine force.
Girl, by Muraina Oyelami, hanging above a display of family photographs in the living room © Christian Cassiel
The best book I’ve read in the past year is the literary equivalent of walking on water. It is Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, in James E Falen’s miraculous translation, published by Oxford World’s Classics. Many fine translators have given us unforgettable versions of this fountain of Russian literature, including the bruiser aesthete Nabokov himself, but none of them reaches the Mozartian purity of this translation, which reads as if it were written originally in English by a genius. In this verse novel the poignancy of youth meets the wistful, tragic air of lost possibilities. Out of its penumbra emerged the classic figures and tropes of Russian literature. I recommend that you read a verse a day and savour this work for the rest of the year.
