By Ginny Dougary. Sydney Morning Herald, October 16, 2020. Andrew Davies is a literary conqueror – first Russia with his adaptation of War and Peace (praised, disconcertingly, by Vladimir Putin for capturing the Russian soul), then Les Miserables (sans tunes) mining the spirit of France via Victor Hugo, and now comes India, with the television screenwriter’s latest adaptation: Vikram Seth’s …
The English author admits to ‘an almighty crush’ on the celebrated Australian writer whose writing, fabled life and mystique have swept her away. Sydney Morning Herald, APRIL 10, 2020 On October 10, 2016, The New Yorker printed an interview by its editor, David Remnick, with a fast-fading but still spirited Leonard Cohen. A month later, the sad …
Disguise comes in many forms and in Jez Butterworth’s case it is his London home. What confounds the visitor is the disparity between the address – a prime central location – and the appearance of the handsome Georgian townhouse. First, there’s a scruffy set of doorbells, with a handwritten note saying that the occupants are …
What a peculiar, slightly seedy, febrile family the du Mauriers seem to have been. We may not be startled by its members’ attitude to morality if you look at the raw ingredients. Descended from French aristocrats (although this was later discovered by Daphne, the subject of the book, to have been a background upgrade, faked …
An interview with the all-round good egg and nation’s darling? What could possibly go wrong … until the nightmare of ‘copy control’ started. After 35 years as a journalist, I experienced two firsts last week. One was that I asked for my byline to be removed from an interview I had written, which was a direct …
Beryl Bainbridge lied as a child and it was a habit that stuck. Exasperated by the writer’s constant verbal fudging over her shenanigans with married men, one friend wrote to her: ‘Oh, you never tell the truth. You’re dreadfully dishonest’ — six years went by before the friendship was healed. Bainbridge’s biographer, Brendan King, was …
By Ginny Dougary March 2013 The Guardian Travel writer Sara Wheeler’s latest book chronicles the middle-aged Englishwomen who reinvented themselves in 19th-century America. Sara Wheeler’s home is a converted Victorian butcher’s shop, close to Hampstead Heath, with Matisse-blue and Gauguin-orange walls covered in reminders of her travels: an original Herbert Ponting photograph from Captain Scott’s …
29 Nov 2012 (Daily Telegraph Magazine) Ian Hislop is in the first-floor dining-room of the Coach and Horses, a defiantly unreconstructed pub in Soho, London, greeting his guests at the Private Eye lunch he has hosted for the past 26 years, ever since Richard Ingrams made the initially controversial decision to hand over the editorship …
By Ginny Dougary FT MAGAZINE September 2012 The last time we saw one another was in Manhattan in the summer of 2005. It was in a private club, the sun was blazing, and Rushdie was relaxed and cheerful in sandals and a loose, bright blue shirt, watching his infant son, Milan – who now, at …
Old at heart: Richard Ingrams Ginny Dougary August 2012 FT MAGAZINE The man who was one of the founding fathers of Private Eye, as well as its editor for 23 years, had arranged to meet me ostensibly to discuss the 20th anniversary of his “new” magazine The Oldie and my journey to Aldworth, where he …