A new production of Francis Durbridge’s 1947 detective serial, Paul Temple and Steve, has just finished on BBC Radio 4 this week. Created in 1938, Durbridge wrote 20 serials featuring Temple for the radio, beginning with Send For Paul Temple, and he was also the star of his own TV series…
1 What I like to call Pamela Hansford Johnson’s ‘Good’ series. This is not a comment on the books, although they are more than good, but the easiest way to refer to them as a pair!
‘After some weeks’ association with Albert I decided that he did not in any way measure up to the popular estimation of what a lion should be. He was sulky, blustery and devoid of any finer feelings whatsoever. His small, golden eyes always had in them an expression of baffled rage; it seemed that he was trying to uphold his race’s reputation for fierceness but could not remember why. There was always a faintly puzzled look about him, as though he were wondering whether it was necessary to behave in this way. When he was not prowling about in a filthy temper he was indulging in his ‘joke’ of jumping out suddenly at unsuspecting passers-by and getting a sardonic pleasure out of their panic.’
As I drove to the ice rink with my wife and kids up here in Vermont, where we are spending a few days’ vacation, I thought about the choices we all make. Marie made hers many years ago, devoting her life to being a war correspondent. Everything else—her health, her family, her personal life—came second. Naturally, she sometimes thought of doing something else, something less crazy. At our last lunch, she spoke in her throaty-voiced way about the possibility of writing a book and dialing it back—maybe getting a gig at a think tank or a journalism school. I think we both knew she’d never do it. Many moons ago, she quit reporting for a while and spent a couple of years on the Sunday Times foreign desk, rewriting copy and managing other reporters. She nearly died of boredom…
…We all have to die sometime. Marie died doing what she loved, what made her feel most alive, what turns journalism from a job into something bigger and more noble: a mission. It’s perhaps not much of a consolation to her many friends and her family, but it’s what happened.- In today’s Daily Comment, John Cassidy remembers Marie Colvin: http://nyr.kr/zxBWTq
Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed.
The new Swedish thriller sensation… easy on the eye
One of the great Hollywood movies… the title of the movie refers to Walt Whitman’s poem ‘The Untold Want’ (they don’t do titles like that no more) which reads in its entirety:
‘The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,Dorothy Parker (bless her)
A plethora of Gerald Durrells! (Or whatever the appropriate collective noun for Gerald Durrell books is.)
