Dominick Dunne: A Tribute

A beautiful memorial to Dominick Dunne is offered at Vanity Fair
Leave your condolences here.

Wikipedia

BBC: Lorna Doone

Now we can enjoy the romance of Exmoor online...

"The BBC dished up Lorna Doone as its classic costume drama for Christmas 2000 and served its source material well. R. D. Blackmore's novel of dangerous times and inter-clan warfare on Exmoor during the time of the Monmouth Rebellion is highly romantic. At its centre is the ongoing war between John Ridd (Richard Coyle), the yeoman with a noble heart, and Carver Doone, the reckless young leader of the outlawed family who murdered Ridd's father. Aside from their familial enmity, they are also rival suitors for the hand of the eponymous heroine (a spirited performance from Amelia Warner). The production avoids overkill on the swashbuckling front: the battle scenes are grim and bloody; Lorna herself is cocooned by her family but the Doone clan lives in a bleak, rough encampment with few comforts. And in Aidan Gillan's Carver, we have an anti-hero of extraordinary charisma, driven and ultimately destroyed by his single-minded determination to make Lorna his wife or see her dead. A stirring evening's viewing which offers the good old-fashioned satisfaction of just desserts all round." --Piers Ford

Read an online illustrated version of the book here.

BBC: A walk in Lorna Doone country - Link

The Luxe: Tabloid tales with a late-19th-century twist

Tabloid tales with a late-19th-century twist

LEAH McLAREN

February 23, 2008

Picture Manhattan high society in the late 1890s: a decadent world in which privileged young women fill their evenings with wild parties and their days with shopping, all the while attracting the attention of a gossip-hungry press.

Okay, so not much has changed for the Hilton sisters. Apart from the fake tans and unashamed pantylessness, the inimitable Paris and Nicky would be right at home in the pages of The Luxe (Harper Teen), a young-adult novel by American author Anna Godbersen. The teen bodice ripper is an international hit, published in 11 countries with fat sequels to follow.

Its success is easy to understand. The Luxe is exactly my sort of trash: a compelling melodrama that demands nothing but basic literacy and opposable thumbs on the part of its reader. And it is timely - not just because of the recent explosion in the young-adult fiction market, but for the way it exposes the bad behaviour of idle adolescents who have little else to do in life but keep themselves out of scandal, yet somehow manage to do just the opposite.

"The Victorians didn't have celebrities in the sense that we do now. It was all about watching the rich," Godbersen, who is just 27 herself, says during a phone interview from her home in Brooklyn. "Cultural commentators talk about our time as the new Gilded Age. And that's because there's still this divide between the rich and the rest of us."

Continues at link...

Will this give Jilly Cooper new competition?