Author Archive: Lesley Jakobsen
Must You Go? (Antonia Fraser)
Nymphaea Black Princess Water Lily
One half of the TVC team considers published diaries and collections of letters to be a lazy form of memoir. This review is written by that half. In the opinion of this half, plodding through a (probably) heavily edited and unsynthesised lot of journal entries or epistles is an unedifying and disjointed experience. And so it is with “Must You Go?“, Lady Antonia Fraser’s annotated diary of her time with the late Harold Pinter – who, as a playwright was master of the notorious, enigmatic pause. Pinter was also an actor and political activist, particularly in the causes of the Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia…
Continue Reading →7 Academy Award Outfits – the Good, the Bad and the Ugggghhhh
Have people learnt since the 2016 Golden Globes? Here are TVCs seven notable red carpet outfits from this year’s Oscars. The Good… The Bad… The Lovely…. and the Ugggghhhh…
Continue Reading →The Life of Elves (Muriel Barbery)
Horse or boar?
Although a book should not be judged by its cover, we at TVC assert that it can be judged by its title, at least prima facie, unless and until evidence to the contrary is provided. (TVC declined to read The Elegance of the Hedgehog because of our aversion to eye-catching, cutesy titles. How can a novel with such a title, more than 6 million sales and a plot concerning a wise concierge and a suicidal teen be anything but “young adult” pulp?) The advance notices, however, about Muriel Barbery’s third novel, The Life of Elves were promising. It had a less try-hard title, good reviews and no sales at all…
Continue Reading →ECO : A Gift From the Heavens
We at TVC have procrastinated about posting an item on the death of Umberto Eco on the 19th February, due to our shame at not having read a great deal of his writing. Of course we have read the potboiler “The Name of the Rose” and the accessible “The Island of the Day Before”. But we have not been able to get past about page 50 of “The Prague Cemetery”, “Foucault’s Pendulum” or “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana”, finding the prose at times impenetrable. But that is our deficiency and we will try harder. We do admire his essays “On Literature” and…
Continue Reading →Atticus Unsympatheticus
Is it a sin to kill a Finch?
Harper Lee died a few days ago. Atticus Finch died a while ago, mortally wounded by the publication of Go Set a Watchman. That is, the holier than thou Gregory-Peck-type Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird, died. The real Atticus Finch, or the draft Atticus Finch, depending on which way you look at it, lives on in infamy. He’s A Bad Man because he’s racist. Lordy lordy. Our whiter than white Atticus was nought but a whited sepulchre. A product of his time and place. Either a man with shades of grey in his past, a hypocrite, an even better lawyer and…
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