Kipling

Yesterday

Anne de Courcy

A life lived to the hilt: Clare Consuelo Sheridan

From our UK edition

Tall, blonde, beautiful, ruthless, brave and amoral to her fingertips (many of this biography’s paragraphs end with ‘The two became lovers’), Clare Consuelo Sheridan was extraordinary – especially for the era in which she lived. Her mother, Clara, was the eldest and fluffiest of the three Jerome sisters who arrived in England in the first wave of American heiresses aiming to marry into the peerage. Her father, Moreton Frewen, was a man so mesmerically gifted with the power of persuading his friends to invest in his catastrophic schemes that he was nicknamed ‘Mortal Ruin’.

Thursday

Craig Raine

The nightmare of making films about poets

From our UK edition

Television and film are popular mediums. Poetry has never been popular. This is Sam Weller’s father in Pickwick Papers, when he discovers his son writing a valentine, alarmed it might be poetry: Poetry’s unnat’tral; no man ever talked poetry ’cept a beadle on boxin’ day, or Warren’s blackin’, or Rowland’s oil, or some o’ them low fellows; never let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy. In 1994, I made a short film about Kipling. The director, Tony Cash, a man with a first-class Oxford degree in Russian, objected to a two-second reference to Aristotle’s ‘pity and terror’ in my script. ‘If you mention Aristotle, they [the TV audience] will think you’re an arsehole or an idiot.

Thursday

Taki

A brief history of harlots

From our UK edition

I write this as a follow-up to last week’s essay on muzzling after making whoopee. I’m on my way to Patmos, an island so difficult to get to, it has kept the great unwashed away. From now it is the only island I will grace with my presence, until the next time, that is. It was Kipling who quipped about journalists having ‘power without responsibility’. He then added the phrase ‘the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’, which was repeated by Stanley Baldwin, not Stanley Johnson. Comparing hacks to harlots is, of course, unfair to the girls. Some of them have risen to the highest offices in the past due to their discretion, whereas the only journalist I know who made it to the top is our very own Boris.