Writer and novelist
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.
This 1794 novella is in the form of letters exchanged between some of the characters, through which we trace the exploits of the recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon as she engages in affairs with two men.
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.
Single mothers in the 1950s and 1960s faced prejudice and opprobrium, and were advised to hide their shame by pretending to be married or widowed. You could choose to confer a kind of legitimacy on the child by legally adopting it and giving it your name.
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.
Cathy Come Home was first shown on the BBC as part of its Wednesday Play series. Written by Jeremy Sandford, produced by Tony Garnett and directed by Ken Loach, who has just won the Palme D’Or for the second time in Cannes with his new film, I, Daniel Blake, depicting the injustices of the UK benefits system.
Long before there was the global franchise — now in its 54th year — and before James Bond became a product to be presented and reinvented over and over again, there were the novels by Ian Fleming.
I found Dr No in the secondhand book trough at the end of our road, and read it in a couple of days on the train journey to school. It was sufficiently engrossing and captivating to lead me to a few more Bond books, which I read with equal enjoyment.
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.
Polonius is the ‘wretched, rash, intruding fool’ in Hamlet who comes to an untimely end when Hamlet accidentally stabs him. Hamlet’s farewell words are often taken as a definitive epitaph for Polonius, the father of Ophelia and Laertes, who does indeed earn every one of those descriptors.
Traditionally, Polonius has been played as a pompous windbag who, while not actually deserving such an end, isn’t much mourned. He’s never been a ‘fashionable’ character. Unlike other personae who have a greater imaginative impact, Ophelia and Rosencranz and Guildenstern, for example, Polonius hasn’t been seized on and reinterpreted for different audiences.
Chips With Everything by the playwright Arnold Wesker, who died recently, opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1962, and the following year there was a production in Wimbledon which a gang of us went to see.
This was an outing arranged by the more culturally and politically aware members of our group, and which those of us still paddling in the shallows of cultural activity was approached with more anxiety about theatre etiquette than anticipation of seeing what we didn’t realise was a significant piece of theatre history.
It’s time for another match-up between female TV detectives — this battle sees Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison of the pioneering Prime Suspect taking on the formidable force of Sergeant Catherine Cawood from Happy Valley.
The movie Breakfast At Tiffany’s is a swoony, delicious, captivating film. Its main character is Holly Golightly, delectably played by Audrey Hepburn. But the film is a very different work from its original source — a novella by Truman Capote.
Holly is a girl from Tulip, Texas, a child bride who escapes to New York and reinvents herself as a Manhattan socialite, a kooky, gorgeous, tough yet vulnerable girl about town who throws wild parties and entrances rich men. She eventually finds love with the struggling writer who is her neighbour.
Mary Crawford rocks up at Mansfield Park, home of Sir Thomas Bertram and family, and starts to have some fun. She’s the new girl, not in town but from Town, who brings to the country folk of Northamptonshire more than a whiff of the sophistication and worldly attitudes of the metropolis of London.
We love her — what’s not to love? Mary embodies the qualities which ride high in contemporary preferences. She’s attractive, entertaining, witty, lively, quick-thinking, flirtatious.
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‘Mr Kalinda’ is actually more than a little unfair and inaccurate, even on the basis of our first meeting with Jason Crouse, who becomes Alicia Florrick’s go-to investigator in the latest (and perhaps the last) series of The Good Wife now showing in the UK.
It’s the second episode of series seven, and Kalinda’s ghost hovers in the air as Alicia sets out to hire a new investigator. Who could fill those spike-heeled shoes, we wonder, as three candidates present themselves for the role. One is quickly eliminated, and Alicia has to choose between Amanda Marcassin and Jason Crouse.
We know from the get-go that we are expected to be on Lorelai’s side. We are directed to support Lorelai as she struggles to stand up to Emily, her snobbish, controlling, manipulative, interfering mother.
Well, when you put it like that, why wouldn’t we side with the plucky single mother-of-one’s determination to remain her own woman and to exercise her right to live by her own values? Go Lorelai!
