Virginia Ironside

Thursday

Virginia Ironside

Not him, too

From our UK edition

Over a drink recently I sat next to a man who announced, barely before he’d taken his first sip, that he was a feminist. ‘Like you,’ he added ingratiatingly. Like me?!? Poor sap. Did he imagine that this creepy statement would actually endear me to him? That I admired his courageous stand and was prepared to hang on his every word? Not a bit of it. From that moment, I despised him. Firstly, I’m no feminist and never have been. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, I’m an equal-but-differentist, or would be if such a thing existed. And I have no desire to get my own back on women’s oppressors, if indeed, today, in western society, they are oppressors. I’ve never experienced them as such.

Thursday

Virginia Ironside

Diary – 7 April 2016

From our UK edition

It’s clear that Vladimir Putin has had a facelift, which might explain why Wendi Deng would take an interest in him. But a friend who met him was surprised enough to ask his translator why it was so obvious. ‘Surely he has enough money to get a better one done?’ he said. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘But here in Russia, a facelift is a status symbol so everyone has to be aware that it’s been done.’ I wonder if the reason American women continue to go for the wind-tunnel effect favoured by Joan Rivers isn’t based on the same social pressure. Wealth and power have their own looks. After nearly 50 years of giving advice, my career as an agony aunt appears to be at an end.

Thursday

Virginia Ironside

Virginia Ironside’s diary: Fifty Shades is a story of redemption (but I still won’t watch it)

From our UK edition

All this fuss about Fifty Shades of Grey! I wonder how many people have actually read all three books? Sado-masochism is only half the story. When you’ve waded through the entire oeuvre, if such appalling writing can be dignified with that term, you discover that the whole story is one of redemption. The ostensibly wicked, but aptly named, Christian is actually a tormented man who was cruelly abused by his mother and re-enacts this cruelty towards his lovers. But with a good woman (and a baby), pervy dungeons vanish and love conquers all. Pure Mills & Boon. These days I don’t go to films. I watch the trailers instead and I’ve saved myself hours of misery.

Saturday

Virginia Ironside

Diary – 21 July 2012

A few years back, Julian Maclaren-Ross was a forgotten writer. Today his wonderful books, such as Of Love and Hunger, are back in print, and on Monday, along with his biographer Paul Willetts, I took part in a centenary celebration of his life, with film of the man himself and of many of his contemporaries, most of them now dead: Alan Ross, Joan Wyndham, John Heath-Stubbs. J.M-R., a renowned Fitzrovian bore, was, as a friend of his put it, ‘better on the page than on the pavement’. True of so many writers one knows. ••• One perk of taking my one-woman show round the country, if you can call it a perk, is the glimpses I get of the north of England. Crikey, it really is grim up there.

Saturday

Virginia Ironside

Relatively eccentric

From our UK edition

My uncle Robin Ironside bewailed the demise, after the scandal of the Wilde trial and the early death of Beardsley, of the imaginative tradition which, he wrote, ‘had been kept flickering in England since the end of the 18th century, sometimes with a wild, always uneasy light, by a succession of gifted eccentrics’. The truth is that he himself was one of those very eccentrics. Born in 1912 of a staunchly upper middle-class background, and after stints at the Courtauld and the Sorbonne, he landed, in 1937, the job of assistant keeper to Sir John Rothenstein at the Tate Gallery.