Deborah Friedell is a contributing editor at the LRB.
For my brother’s Hanukah present, I paid for fourth-graders in Northern California to tour UC Berkeley (my brother went to Berkeley) and see a dance show (he likes dance). For his birthday two months later, I paid for chess sets for a school in Philadelphia: we grew up in Philadelphia, he plays chess. But usually when I fund projects on DonorsChoose.org – as anyone with a credit...
A month after she left the State Department, Condoleezza Rice signed a three-book deal, reportedly for more than $2.5 million. The first volume is the story of her childhood, about the parents who raised her with ‘high expectations and unconditional love’. What emerges is a kind of parenting how-to guide, if your goal is to raise a child like her – which she assumes it would...
From Playing the Game by Belle de Jour: jeudi, le 03 novembre Sigh. My boys love me, they do. And do they ever know what sets my tiny heart a-racing. The last two of my birthday gifts have finally come through: from A2, a gift voucher from Figleaves; from A4, a subscription to the London Review of Books.
Pearl Buck was the favourite novelist of both my grandmothers, which like their shingle haircuts and their trust in authority, their Coca-Cola brisket, has always seemed an example of the unassimilable foreignness of their lives to mine. An entire generation fell in love with Buck: they made her dozens of books international bestsellers and gave her the Nobel Prize. No writer was more often...
'It's the kind of book Jane Austen would've written if she'd been male and hipper.' 'It's The Name of the Rose if Sean Connery's character was a conglomeration of self-aware spores instead of a medieval monk.' 'If Virginia Woolf had a younger sister with a passionate interest in icebergs – ' 'This book is probably the first introduction to disciplined introspection in over 100 years.' 'A powerful depiction of humanity personified.' 'George has fallen in love with Lucy. A prostitute. Worse, a robot.' 'No leader of modern times was more unique and more uniquely national than Charles de Gaulle.' 'James Brabazon has written a fully-adrenalised book.' 'If Joan London never writes another word, The Good Parents is more than enough.'
In 1939, Dorothy Thompson was on the cover of Time, the ‘First Lady of American journalism’ and a major celebrity. By 1945, she’d been widely dismissed as a crank.Deborah Friedell joins Tom to discuss...
Laura Beers and Deborah Friedell talk to Tom about the recent decision by the US Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson, which removed the constitutional right to abortion.
Deborah Friedell talks to Thomas Jones about the Rosenbergs, from their early years on the Lower East Side of New York to their execution for conspiracy to commit espionage in 1953, and the significance...
Deborah Friedell talks to Thomas Jones about the origins, and origin myths, of the National Rifle Association, how it spends its money, and why it's wary of winning.
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