For anyone passionate about both Agatha Christie as well as a wee bit nerdy when it comes to names, in reading any of her novels or short stories readers are immediately provided with a wealth of memorable and often unique names: Hercule, Amyas, Linnet, Odell and Honoria are a small sampling of some of her more unusual and eclectic character nomenclatures. Aside from simply being fun to come across, though, Christie’s use of names in her mysteries also give us a glimpse into a variety of fascinating topics, from societal conventions to Christie’s takes on characters who hail from outside of England.
Within the world of bees, the Smeathman’s furrow bee (Lasioglossum smeathmanellum) is an unlikely survivor. Many a “bee-loud glade”—as the poet William Butler Yeats described—has gone quiet as bee populations worldwide succumb to myriad threats. But the Smeathman’s, a jewel-like sweat bee native to the United Kingdom and Ireland, is thriving.
In some ways this is daringly old-fashioned writing, its forms as retrospective as the bombed city and prewar furniture. There’s an omniscient narrator, no trendy close-third here, and, as the quotations suggest, no coyness about adjectives. This novella isn’t a parable or a political fiction, as many recent short novels have been. It’s a pen portrait of a particular family in a particular time and place, quick and bright despite – or maybe, oddly, because of – the magnificently Victorian tendencies of the prose.
You’re diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of 46. How do you react? In all likelihood with rage, grief and self-pity, especially if, like Simon Boas, you were told it was only acid reflux, and cancelled scans and bureaucratic cock-ups further delayed treatment. You love your wife, you have a great job, you’re addicted to cheese fondue and muscadet, and death will take all that away. A nightmare, it seems, but far from bewailing his lot Boas tells us how insanely contented he feels and “how lucky it is to have lived at all”.
At the corner of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards once stood a monument to one of the greatest movie flops of all time. A 300ft-high plasterboard Babylon, with walls wide enough to shoot chariot races on, it was flanked by giant white elephants (oh the symbolism!). Intolerance (1916), a three-and-a-half-hour silent movie, performed so catastrophically at the box office that its megalomaniac creator DW Griffiths couldn’t afford to demolish the set. For years it remained, crumbling, as a warning to Hollywood – “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Thankfully Hollywood didn’t give two hoots, because otherwise we’d have missed out on Tim Robey’s erudite and brilliantly entertaining chronicle of movie excess.
Late in her life Dorothy Parker claimed during an interview that if she wrote a memoir—which she was loathe to do (and never did)—she would title it Mongrel. That’s the kind of telling, troubling nugget that writer, researcher, academic Gail Crowther unearths in her fascinating Dorothy Parker in Hollywood. Crowther set herself a tricky task, as Parker is both someone people tend to feel they know—heck, her poems might get recited from memory more than anyone’s, especially by those fond of martinis or mordant wit—but also don’t know at all. It’s easy to think of her as a relic of the Roaring 20s and the brilliance of the Algonquin and not even realized she didn’t pass away until 1967. It’s hard to imagine her listening to the Velvet Underground and hanging with Warhol.