Linkage
Mariella Frostrup delivers a neat codslap to correspondent who asserts
Evolutionary hard-wiring means we men fall into the role of charmer and deceiver at the same time in order to get laid. It's an art form. It's crucial that women recognise this.
with the observation that
You seem to be suggesting that the way to ascertain whether a woman is good partner material or not is to establish how little she thinks of you. The less interested, attracted and impressed she is by your charm offensive, the better long-term lover she will make. For an adult to base his opinion of a fellow human being on the low esteem in which they hold him is sheer foolishness.
Barbara Ellen considers Debrett's Etiquette for Girls (and this TWFU just at the title), and suggests
This seems to be the problem with the age-old Pygmalion routine, currently doing the television rounds in Ladette to Lady. It still only goes one way, with supposed little 'trollops' mincing around with books on their heads and learning to 'speak proper' - and for what? These days, nicely brought up young girls and women could do a lot worse than learn from their more clued-up counterparts how to safely navigate their way through a street culture they seem to crave, but ultimately haven't the foggiest about, sometimes with tragic results. Maybe this is the only chapter Debrett's forgot to include: ask people who were born with natural grace and manners - people who still manage to say 'please' and 'thank you' when struggling to get by on council estates - how to behave and maybe, just maybe, we all might learn something.
Alex Clark wonders whether 'the new technologies are subtly good at depriving us of rare pleasures while suffocating us with the illusion of choice'. Also, recounts a phone conversation with an eminent writer following last week's column about house being taken over by books:
We talk about how nice it would be if someone broke in and obligingly stole 5,000 books in the night or, indeed, about the efficacy of employing an impoverished student to sell them on eBay - for a cut, of course.
The trouble there would be making sure the burglar took the 5000 unwanted volumes and not one's most precious, much-sought-after and finally acquired, darlings.
And (via a mailing list) after the repackaging of Jane Austen as chicklit, the gothicising of Charlotte Bronte:
[I]ts demure spine is done up to look just like a scuffed leather-bound first edition, while the campy cover was drawn by underground comic-book artist Dame Darcy, whose neo-Victorian, funky, Addams-family-style creations have won her a cult following. Aiming to make the novel look "really kind of punk rock for the new generation of goth girls," she picked "the scene where Jane Eyre is freaking out while the giant mansion is burning behind".
People who have actually read the novel will know at once What Is Wrong With This Picture.