Arabella Byrne

Arabella Byrne

Arabella Byrne is the co-author of In The Blood: On Mothers, Daughters and Addiction.

Jared, Ivanka and the art of the social pariah

In New York society, you’re nobody until somebody hates you. By which maxim Jared and Ivanka Kushner will be extremely high-profile indeed. Expelled from the White House after four years, President Trump’s shoe-designer turned special advisor daughter and her real-estate mogul husband find themselves in need of a job and, perhaps more pressingly, somewhere to live.  Will they return to New York’s playground of the filthy rich where they used to pose on the Met Gala carpet and hobnob with the likes of Murdoch’s ex-wife Wendi Deng and oil tycoon Mikey Hess? Given not only the past four years but more recent indiscretions in DC, it seems unlikely.

The dos and don’ts of the inauguration outfit

Given recent events on the inauguration scaffolding, Jill Biden may do well to wear a bullet-proof vest to watch her husband become the 46th President of the United States and be done with it. But Inauguration Day calls for some serious sartorial politicking and it seems unlikely Dr B will want to miss out. Long before Michelle sashayed her way to the 2013 ceremony in that Thom Browne coat, Thomas Carlyle spoke of the power of clothes in his 1834 Sartor Resartus: “Society is founded upon cloth” he said simply, and most women in the world would agree with him.

What the books in our Zoom backgrounds really say about us

From our US edition

To cast your eye across someone’s bookshelves is to understand them. Alan Bennett certainly thought so: 'A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.' Journeying across my own bookshelves I see the spines of my life, not curated or color-coded, but jammed in messily and haphazardly, out of chronological order, just like experience itself. Brideshead Revisited next to Healing the Child Within. Babar next to The Fallen of the Somme. Since I got married, my husband’s books now number among my own; political biographies next to novels, a literary record of our lives before we met, pages and pages of the past.

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