A toothsome if uneven mix of espionage, Middle Eastern politics, kidnapping and the ever-fertile setting of an exclusive girls’ school makes Cat Among The Pigeons (1959) by Agatha Christie a rattling good read.
The plot hinges on a cache of jewels, worth about three quarters of a million pounds, which Ali Yusuf, Sheik of Ramat, wants to smuggle out of his country before he is captured or killed by revolutionary forces. He entrusts the jewels to his good friend Bob Rawlinson, who secrets them in the luggage of his sister and niece, Joan and Jennifer Sutcliffe.
Now, Voyager is a classic women’s picture, a melodrama, a three-hanky weepie. In many ways, it’s something of a mess, with separate stories and themes jostling for attention.
Hands up, I wanted a happy ending to say goodbye to The Good Wife. Or at least a satisfying ending which signed off on an optimistic note and met my need to see equilibrium restored.
Who knew that someone actually created the beehive? The someone who did so was called Margaret Vinci Hedl, and she died recently on June 10, 2016.
Scheming women, stupid men, sex, money, power — Jane Austen’s juvenile work Lady Susan has all the elements which are to appear in her later novels.
The L-Shaped Room, Lynne Reid Banks’ 1960 novel about the pregnancy of a young (ish) single mother, is a superb evocation of a time when women’s choices were limited and attitudes to sex and marriage had not yet been challenged by the ‘permissive’ 1960s.
London was starting to swing in 1966 but away from the glamour there was widespread squalour that was shown unflinchingly by director Ken Loach in Cathy Come Home.
The 1969 film All Neat in Black Stockings is based on a novel by Jane Gaskell, a prize-winning writer whose literary output over three decades consists mainly of fantasy novels. Her mid-1960s’ vampire romance The Shiny Narrow Grin has been acclaimed as the Twilight of its day, and some say is superior to it.
