Langan’s Brasserie
by Richard Young, richardyounggallery, £50
The Mayfair restaurant that was opened by Michael Caine and Peter Langan in 1976 shut before the pandemic. Now its new owners hope to return it to its glory days and have relaunched it with a book by Richard Young, the paparazzo capo who was the in-house photographer during its 1980s celebrity heyday. Although the introduction by Caine is fascinating, it’s the photographs that you linger on. Look, there’s Marie Helvin falling out of the door and her dress; here are Dudley Moore and Billy Connolly sharing a joke; there are Boy George and Marilyn, still friends. This is a time before gluten-free and teetotal lunching. My favourite is a picture of Catherine Deneuve, taking a phone call on a house phone: a snapshot of an elegant moment, long before mobile phones sat alongside the salt and pepper, causing conversational indigestion.
James Bond DB5
by Simon Hugo and Will Lawrence, Hero Collector Books, £40
“I don’t need to tell anybody how important Aston Martin has been for Bond over the years,” writes Daniel Craig in the introduction to this DB5 love-in, brought out to coincide with the release (finally!) of No Time to Die. This is the first official history of James Bond’s DB5, which begins with the genesis of the brand in 1912 and moves swiftly to 1959 when Ian Fleming, in Goldfinger, has his secret agent choose a DB III over a Jaguar 3.4. Car fetishists will be thrilled by the pencil diagrams of control panels, although the rest of us might prefer shots of Sean Connery leaning against a shining bonnet. I particularly liked the end chapter on the DB5 toys, games and models which includes fabulous Thunderball-themed lunchboxes and wallpaper.
The Bucket List: North America: 1,000 Adventures Big and Small
by Kath Stathers and Paul Oswell, Rizzoli, $35
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This bible is for one-time dreamers who were feeling landlocked by the pandemic and are motivated to plan the trip of a lifetime with the news that North America is opening up to us again. Kath Stathers, a veteran writer of bucket-list books, makes sure her reach is broad. Rather than merely writing to younger people, she includes jaunts for the retired and people of all abilities and persuasions. If you’ve always wanted to track Alaska’s “big five” (grizzly bear, caribou, gray wolf, moose and Dall sheep) here’s how (in Denali National Park). Others may be happier skiing the Canadian Rockies, cruising in a vintage convertible down Route 66 or dropping in on the ghost of Elvis at Graceland. Whichever it is, flicking through this is quite a trip.
Art Deco Style
Introduction by Jared Goss, Assouline, £95
If, like me, you spend a disproportionate amount of time typing “art deco” into eBay, this is the tome for you. In his introduction Jared Goss, a former associate curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, reminds us that the term “art deco” is “an abbreviation of the French arts decoratifs” and was invented in the 1960s. He points out that art deco is the Bakelite cigarette holder in the fingers of the artist, rather than the artist herself. With that in mind, we are given a licence to wallow in glorious stuff: from a 1925 decorated bottle by Maurice Marinot to a film still of the 1931 Beaux Arts ball in New York at which architects dressed as their most famous buildings. There is much to savour – once you’ve blown the dust off your vintage martini glasses and poured yourself a sidecar.
