Learning to Drink and What Came After

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 and behind the scenes at The Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.





Geradine's remarkable life has enjoyed a ringside seat in the drinking dens of Soho alongside artists and criminals, the last days (and nights) of 1970s Fleet Street, the lofty world of the Mayfair auction houses and the dangerous glamour of post-glasnost Saint Petersburg.



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 as well as the investigation of forgers and fakes in the art world.