Deborah Friedell is a contributing editor at the LRB.
One of the more unlikely heroes in English literature is Dickens’s rent collector Pancks, a ‘dry, uncomfortable, dreary Plodder and Grubber’, who shows a ‘sagacity that nothing could baffle, and a patience and secrecy that nothing could tire' to determine that the Dorrits languishing in debtors’ prison are heirs to a fortune that ‘had long lain unknown of, unclaimed and accumulating’. No such sagacity would now be required, at least in America.
'As if Joyce had sat down and written Sin City.' (Cape) 'If Fred Astaire had been a novelist he'd have been Paul Bailey.' (Bloomsbury) 'An homage to Miss Marple – or Miss Marple as a badass, paralysed Norwegian lesbian detective.' (Corvus)
Recently published (and possibly available from the London Review Bookshop): Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star That Gave Us Life The Meerkats of Summer Farm: The True Story of Two Orphaned Meerkats and the Family Who Saved Them Trawlerman: My Life at the Helm of the Most Dangerous Job in Britain Life, on the Line: A Chef's Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat The Wolf Within: How I Learned to Talk Dog I Remember, Daddy: The Harrowing True Story of a Daughter Haunted by Memories Too Terrible to Forget Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine My Natural History: The Animal Kingdom and How it Shaped Me Schizophrenia: Who Cares?
For my brother’s Hanukah present, I paid for fourth-graders in Northern California to tour UC Berkeley (my brother went to Berkeley) and see a dance show (he likes dance). For his birthday two months later, I paid for chess sets for a school in Philadelphia: we grew up in Philadelphia, he plays chess. But usually when I fund projects on DonorsChoose.org – as anyone with a credit...
A month after she left the State Department, Condoleezza Rice signed a three-book deal, reportedly for more than $2.5 million. The first volume is the story of her childhood, about the parents who raised her with ‘high expectations and unconditional love’. What emerges is a kind of parenting how-to guide, if your goal is to raise a child like her – which she assumes it would...
In 1939, Dorothy Thompson was on the cover of Time, the ‘First Lady of American journalism’ and a major celebrity. By 1945, she’d been widely dismissed as a crank.Deborah Friedell joins Tom to discuss...
Laura Beers and Deborah Friedell talk to Tom about the recent decision by the US Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson, which removed the constitutional right to abortion.
Deborah Friedell talks to Thomas Jones about the Rosenbergs, from their early years on the Lower East Side of New York to their execution for conspiracy to commit espionage in 1953, and the significance...
Deborah Friedell talks to Thomas Jones about the origins, and origin myths, of the National Rifle Association, how it spends its money, and why it's wary of winning.
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