Ginger Rogers: chorus girl and ensemble player

Quite unexpectedly, April 2023 turned out to be Ginger Rogers Month for me. The BFI held a retrospective of her films brilliantly titled ‘All That Sass’ and I signed up for the tie-in BFI/City Lit course as I figured it would give me something to do on Tuesday evenings and there wouldn’t be any pressure.…

Read More

On My Radar (2)

The Museum I recently spent a few days in Bournemouth (I hadn’t had a night away in nearly two years) and my favourite thing in Bournemouth itself was definitely the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum. Merton and Annie Russell-Cotes, owners of Bournemouth’s Royal Bath Hotel, were avid travellers, collectors and philanthropists. They didn’t have any…

Read More

Tension by E.M. Delafield

E.M. Delafield is synonymous with Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930) and it always comes as a surprise that her other novels are so different. Consequences (1919) and Thank Heaven Fasting (1932) are terribly bleak indictments of the Edwardian marriage market that remind me of a less ornate Edith Wharton. Tension (1920), an early and…

Read More

Tea is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex

I have to admit it: despite the excellent title, I wasn’t expecting Mary Essex’s Tea Is So Intoxicating (1950) to be one of my favourites in the British Library Women Writers series. I previously found Elizabeth von Arnim’s farcical Father quite silly (like Barbara Pym on an off day) and I’d heard this title compared…

Read More