Deborah Friedell

Deborah Friedell is a contributing editor at the LRB.

On 16 October 1986 a maid went into a downtown Miami hotel room and found two dead bodies. One was tied to a chair, riddled with bullets; the other was kneeling, shot through the head. They were Derrick Moo Young, aged 53, and his son Duane Moo Young, 23, businessmen from Jamaica who had looked after properties in Fort Lauderdale owned by the man who would be accused of killing them, Krishna...

Letter
Deborah Friedell writes: I refer Claire Tomalin to Mark Bostridge’s letter and to pages 395-96 of her Dickens biography. There she notes inconsistencies in the usual account of Dickens’s death at Gad’s Hill and offers ‘another possible version of the events of Wednesday 8 June’, in which Dickens may have ‘made the familiar journey by train and cab to Peckham’, given Nelly her housekeeping...

His Friends Were Appalled: Dickens

Deborah Friedell, 5 January 2012

Only after Charles Dickens was dead did the people who thought they were closest to him realise how little they knew about him. His son Henry remembered once playing a memory game with him:

My father, after many turns, had successfully gone through the long string of words, and finished up with his own contribution, ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30 Strand.’ He gave this with an odd...

The Protectorate was over, the Commonwealth had failed. Charles II entered London on 29 May 1660, his birthday, and began hanging judges and reopening theatres. Tongue firmly in cheek, a royal patent lamented that ‘many plays formerly acted do contain several profane, obscene and scurrilous passages’: the solution was to have women’s parts henceforth played by women, as...

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