Once A Gentleman

Description for ONCE A GENTLEMAN by Donald James: ONCE A GENTLEMAN is a sweeping, richly textured tale of an obsessional love affair that parallels a lost generation's coming of age in the flamboyant twenties and the sinister thirties. When Claus von Hardenberg, an impoverished German aristocrat, is offered a free education at Cambridge, he leaps at the opportunity for all things British leads him to heartily---if foolishly--embrace the myth of the English gentleman, and to fall headlong in love with his English cousin, Lady Diana Winslow. Time and international politics conspire to keep the lovers apart. When World War I erupts, Claus returns to his homeland to fight against the country he so recently adopted as his own, and Diana is thrust into her role as the heiress to the Winslow fortune. The fighting takes Claus to Africa where the amoral, fabulously wealthy society of the Happy Valley, awash in champagne and cocaine, fliryd with free love and fascism. Diana, who has