Search Results

“... In Theory of War, Joan Brady reveals a little-known piece of American history that has dominated her own life. In the chaos after the Civil War, white children, the sons and daughters of impoverished widows, of ragged soldiers, were sold into virtual slavery. Black slaves – who had been expensive – had just been liberated ...”

“... that this was a life ‘lacking any pretensions to bourgeois respectability’. The book ends with Joan Poynder talking about her solitary childhood at Hartham Park, Wiltshire, left by a much-loved nanny (‘she went to the Crown Princess of Sweden, brought up all those children’) to linger among ‘big solid toys you didn’t forget’. Savouring a variety ...”

“... journalists, gossip-columnists and even critics), he was possibly the least culpable. Even Brady, an admirer, in his exhaustive and occasionally exhausting coverage, fails from time to time to set the record straight aggressively enough, and falls victim to what we should regard as the received malice. Although an admirer, ...”

“... Carolina). His poems explore forms of celebrity femininity: he writes about the heartaches of Joan Crawford, Jane Fonda and Bette Davis; imagines Barbara Hutton taken in a white silk crib to the White House followed by five hundred devotees; pictures Marlene Dietrich moving ‘majestically down the avenue to guard over/the war-torn refugees, waifs who ...”

“... critical pieces that British and American journalists were writing about French affairs. Tom Brady, for example, the New York Times correspondent in North Africa, incensed an assortment of colonels and ministerial minions, who, like most of their compatriots, hadn’t got a clue what was brewing in Algeria. They honestly thought it was a special case ...”

“... by her as her only escape – or, as with Myra Hindley, an evil, compelling ‘mad’ genius, Ian Brady, virtually taking over her soul by making her do the most unimaginable harm to innocent children. Women’s crimes or even misdemeanours go to the very spot where the meaning and value of ‘woman’ balances the murderous testosterone of masculinity and ...”