With their bonnets and frills, slender legs and empty smiles, Queen Letizia of Spain and the Duchess of Cambridge are the poster girls for the second sex. The ideals of equality and emancipation women have struggled to achieve for centuries is swept away like a handful of dust every time they slip into their stilettos […]
Monthly Archives: April 2022
SUICIDAL TENDENCIES
Writers are prone to suicidal tendencies. In fact, more than other creatives, the man and woman of letters is ’10 to 20 times more likely than his contemporaries to suffer manic depression.’ If you want to cheer yourself up, you can read all about it in Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, by Kay […]
HOW TO FIND THE RIGHT WORD
If you want to find the right word, stop looking. It will find you. Words don’t like being prodded about. They want to be left alone. They mingle in dusty corners, conspiring to keep the lost word hidden. They appear – when they appear – like the evening primrose that blooms in the dark when […]
MARQUIS de SADE – LIFE OF DEBAUCHERY
The Marquis de Sade plucked reluctant virgins, debauched serving girls, beat his wife, practised sodomy and wrote stories featuring rape, incest, necrophilia, torture and bestiality. He was also a war hero, lent his name to the word sadism and practically invented the erotic genre. More two hundred years after his death in 1814, the Marquis de […]
MESSAGE FOR THE RED WALL
This is a message for the red wall voters who chose Brexit in the Referendum and Boris Johnson in the General Election: You’ve been: lied to conned cheated treated like fools You chose Brexit to take back control and lost what little control you had – the freedom to live, work and start a business abroad; […]
THE BOMBING OF GUERNICA
The bombing of Guernica on 26 April 1937 wiped the small Basque town off the map. The outrage inspired Picasso’s painting Guernica, one of mankind’s greatest pieces of art, and has been replicated through March of 2022 by Vladimir Putin’s persistent air strikes on Mariupol. The attack on Guernica, an undefended town of 7,000 people, […]