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Being principled comes at a cost
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The Hand of Fatima
John Julius Norwich
Writer
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Views | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31. A good bathroom does help | 64 | 01:48 | |
| 32. Notable house guests | 65 | 02:07 | |
| 33. Iris Tree | 64 | 02:08 | |
| 34. Evelyn Waugh | 85 | 02:08 | |
| 35. Domestic arrangements | 50 | 01:44 | |
| 36. Our house in Gower Street | 67 | 01:53 | |
| 37. The trompe l’œil niche | 56 | 00:50 | |
| 38. Feodor Chaliapin | 56 | 02:03 | |
| 39. The Hand of Fatima | 57 | 01:27 | |
| 40. Being principled comes at a cost | 60 | 03:35 |
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Chaliapin was an unbridled force of nature and he'd fallen in love with my mother, and he went when she was doing The Miracle in London, he went to see it on the matinee performance. He'd seen it a hundred times before, I think, but he went again because he loved it. And he came... burst into her dressing room the moment it was over and my mother was sitting at her make-up table rubbing cold cream all over her face and getting the make-up off and all that. And Chaliapin in his excitement seized her hand and in order to show her the state of his immense excitement, clamped it to his groin. And my mother said, 'Feodor, what are you doing? My dresser's here, my father's arriving in a minute, everybody's going to arrive! Take it away.' So he took it away. So then several people did arrive and she saw, to her horror, there was a huge sort of white hand, of the prophet... the Hand of Fatima all over the front of Chaliapin's trousers made of white cold cream or vanishing cream or something like that. She said it was one of the most embarrassing moments of her life.
John Julius Norwich (1929-2018) was an English popular historian, travel writer and television personality. He was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, at Eton, at the University of Strasbourg and on the lower deck of the Royal Navy before taking a degree in French and Russian at New College, Oxford. He then spent twelve years in H.M. Foreign Service, with posts at the Embassies in Belgrade and Beirut and at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva. In 1964 he resigned to become a writer. He is the author of histories of Norman Sicily, the Republic of Venice, the Byzantine Empire and, most recently, 'The Popes: A History'. He also wrote on architecture, music and the history plays of Shakespeare, and presented some thirty historical documentaries on BBC Television.
Title: The Hand of Fatima
Listeners: Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
Tags: The Miracle, Feodor Chaliapin
Duration: 1 minute, 27 seconds
Date story recorded: 2017
Date story went live: 03 October 2018
