Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother edited by William Shawcross Every generation gets the queen mother it desires, or deserves (to adapt Jacquetta Hawkes’s remark about Stonehenge). Seemingly impassive as any megalith, she waved and smiled through a century. From blushing bride…
Category: Writing
Here it is, you can plant roses in Los Angeles and it looks like this in the Spring: And, they make glorious bouquets, especially the English and Romantica roses: But, come the blazing days of late Summer: And suddenly your roses turn crispy, like crunchy cornflakes, and you have to…
I’m in a reblogging mood! Silver Screenings allowed me to talk with her young writers group (and they certainly won’t be reading my book until they are older) but they are the very embodiment of dedicated writers, it was inspiring spending time with them. Thanks to Silver Screenings for that…
As you know, I’ve been in Palm Springs. Which I have a kind of atavistic love for… The architecture and the terrain: The coupling of cacti and swimming pools… What I forgot about the desert was the wind. The wind that kicks up out of nowhere, throwing palm fronds to…
“This is like finding the Land of Oz or some lost tomb,” said Josh Karp, the author of a book about the movie to be published next year by St. Martin’s Press. “This film is art imitating life and life imitating art. It’s become so mythical because of what happened…
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the cinema to my generation. I went at least twice a week (on Saturdays all seats were a shilling for the noon performance at the local fleapit) often taking my brother John, and soaked in celluloid emotions from the c’est-la-vie melancholy of…
ROSAMOND LEHMANN A writer works from the material she has, but it comes from the unconscious. Everything is stored up and one never knows what comes up to the surface at a given moment. A period of gestation is certainly needed, what Wordsworth called “emotion recollected in tranquility.” You cannot…