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Learning to Drink and What Came After

9780749033149
352 pages
Allison & Busby Ltd
Overview

Learning to Drink and What Came After is an irreverent take on a life that has been lived across the pages of The Times, within the darkly glamorous haunts of Soho alongside artists and criminals, the lofty world of Mayfair auction houses and behind the scenes at The Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.

As the first female leader writer on The Times, Geraldine was embedded in the heart of Fleet Street, ultimately building up to a daring but unsuccessful management buyout attempt.

Geraldine's background as a statistician led to her being The Times' key saleroom correspondent, where she was instrumental in uncovering scandalous financial irregularities in the auction houses and some of the most notorious forgers of the era (such as Tom Keating).

Author Bio
Geraldine Norman was born in Wales in 1940 and brought up in Oxford. She has a BA in Mathematics from the University of Oxford and joined The Times as a statistician in 1962. In 1967 she launched the Times-Sotheby index of art prices and in 1969 became The Times Sale Room Correspondent. In 1971, she married author and playwright Frank Norman, best known for his memoir of prison life Bang to Rights. She was director of the Hermitage Development Trust and has written extensively on its artworks.