Search Results

“... Dorothy Parker​ dreaded repetition and found it everywhere. In 1919, when she was just 25 and only months into her stint as Vanity Fair’s theatre critic, she already claimed enough ‘bitter experience’ to know that ‘one successful play of a certain type’ would result in a ‘vast horde’ of copycats, ‘all built on exactly the same lines ...”

“... Of all the now vanished breed of New Yorker humorists – James Thurber, E.B. White, Dorothy Parker – S.J. Perelman wrote by far the richest, most meticulously crafted prose. His dedication to his art was almost frightening. He was once asked in an interview how many drafts each piece went through. ‘Thirty-seven,’ he replied ...”

“... the saw and the hammer, the smell of boiling fish glue. In the course of these pieces the work of Dorothy Parker is discussed, the letters of Madame de Sévigné, the personalities of Marie Tempest, Noel Coward, Eddie Marsh, the Aga Khan; there are pensées on playing bridge, the reasons why the American dislike the English, an account of what it’s ...”

“... guy on the T-shirt was, though he recognised the champagne. In his best moments, he’s a reverse Dorothy Parker, curving another déclaration folle into the back of the net. ‘We’re definitely going to get Brooklyn christened,’ he said, ‘but we don’t know into which religion.’ The laughter peters out though when you consider his blithe ...”

“... also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of Strachey; there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s birth); there’s one by Henry ...”

“... of the altered environment of religious art Alsop gives us a previously unpublished quatrain by Dorothy Parker on a picture given by William Randolph Hearst to his mistress: Upon my honour, I saw a Madonna Hanging within a niche Above the door of the private whore Of the world’s worst son of a bitch. I’m not sure that this is so inappropriate ...”

“... the necessary protective clothing, with the horror she seems to feel for her biological destiny. Dorothy Parker did this with brilliance and bitterness, and so in her way does Julie Burchill. If you’re not grossly fat you’re probably too thin, and with a nasty skinny mind to go with it. If you’re not irredeemably stupid you’re no doubt so sharp ...”

“... enough to surround her with women who really did make their careers on their own: Rebecca West, Dorothy Parker, Natalie Barney and Zelda’s Montgomery classmate and friend Sara Haardt, who fled belle-dom to write fiction; the serious and tubercular Sara eventually married H.L. Mencken and died shortly afterwards. These women were more or less kind to ...”

“... before been made into a film – and some of it was made up during the shooting. It’s said that Dorothy Parker worked on the screenplay, which is credited to Viña Delmar. What strikes me now as so brilliant in the film is the consistent, apparently casual juxtaposing of the stylised depiction of a brittle social order with handsome doses of raw ...”

“... a year at art college. Her tutor at Parsons School of Design, Diane Arbus, told her she spoke like Dorothy Parker and suggested she become a writer instead. Kruger didn’t exactly take Arbus’s advice, but it left its mark. By 1969 she was working as a freelance picture editor and graphic designer for House and Garden and Aperture, after a stint as head ...”

“... as Marlowe’s revelations floor the decadent rich. The Monkey’s Mask, by the Australian poet Dorothy Porter, takes the transformation of the detective genre a stage further, by writing it in verse. Her detective heroine, Jill Fitzpatrick, is a gay, working-class former cop, who narrates in a hyperactive free-form skitter: Always this  I’ll ring you ...”

“... Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern: ‘Wodehouse and Bolton and Kern are my favourite indoor sport,’ Dorothy Parker said. In the 1930s he earned vast sums during two short spells as a Hollywood scriptwriter ($2500 a week in 1930; $1500 a week in 1934). His personal life was as uneventful as only that of someone who published more than ninety books in 73 ...”

“... reproduction with more detailed contextualising narratives and a wider cast of tragic characters (Dorothy Parker, who was blacklisted in Hollywood; H.L. Mencken, who came under suspicion for his German background during both wars; John O’Hara, whose many failures included a job application to the fledgling CIA). The book’s editors, JPat ...”

“... is the magnifier for all that 30-foot-tall emoting. As Alan Rudolph’s lugubrious 1995 biopic of Dorothy Parker, Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, illustrates, it was Prohibition that made boozing an essential act of transgression among the Hollywood crowd of the Twenties and Thirties, matching the literary hard ...”

“... specimen of Cockburnian central casting – an impostor? Romania and mythomania are close kin, as Dorothy Parker knew when she wrote: Oh life is a glorious cycle of song A medley of extemporanea And love is a thing that can never go wrong And I am Marie of Romania One of the prime purposes of the old Almanach was precisely to clear up the question of ...”