My review of All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson, by Mark Griffin

All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson

by Mark Griffin

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Some stars illuminate a screen. Others illuminate an era. Rock Hudson managed both, and in All That Heaven Allows, Mark Griffin attempts the daunting task of separating the man from the legend while acknowledging that the two can never be fully untangled.

He was a wholesome Midwestern beefcake with too many swooning female fans for the Hollywood machine to disappoint by letting his true paramour preferences out of the money bag.

But within the industry and around his living and social spots it was an open secret, as with so many Lavender actors of both genders who had to resort to 'beards' for spouses and public events.

That's just how things were and nobody in the entertainment bubble cared much. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper went out of her way to out him before he was ready and had to be sweetened up.

Hudson's ex-wife, lesbian Phyllis Gates, retained a financial hold over him for keeping her lips firmly sealed (after she hired private detective Fred Otash to secretly record Rock confessing his orientation to her). 

Gates publicly denied this and skated around it in her 1987 memoir My Husband, Rock Hudson.

Pre-Stonewall USA was blinkered about anything outside its norm. McCarthyism was rife, as was the Hays Production Code, and high-profile entertainment figures considered remotely subversive or deviant within America's straitlaced societal framework had to pull in their heads or face establishment persecution or industry blacklisting.

The genesis of his film career, while like a movie plot in itself, is not unlike that of many of his Golden Age of Hollywood peers:

Throughout 1947, truck driver Roy Fitzgerald leant habitually against his truck outside Hollywood's Universal studios, hoping to be noticed. The former US Navy aircraft mechanic, when discharged in San Francisco, had opted against returning to his hometown of Winnetka, instead moving to live with his biological father in LA.

He had become drawn to acting while ushering working at a cinema.

Talent scout Henry Willson, on receiving Roy's portrait shot, saw potential and signed up the photogenic heartthrob quick smart, changing his name to Rock Hudson (which the actor later admitted he hated) by pairing the Rock of Gibraltar and the Hudson River.

Willson's stable of beefcake clients, which would include Tab Hunter and Robert Wagner, were reputed to 'co-operate' with Willson to get film roles. Rock, not entirely against the idea, nevertheless drew a line, as with most of Willson's clients who knew the game but set boundaries (as documented in The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson).

This exploitative, ingrained system was not limited to male hopefuls but standard for all. Harvey Weinstein would have been in his element.

Contracted by Universal-International, Hudson's earliest films were uncredited as he worked his way up the ladder and learnt his craft, the studio schooling him in acting, singing, dancing, fencing and horseback riding.

His one-liner debut was as a pilot in war drama Fighter Squadron (1948), in which he took 38 takes to deliver his line. His first credited role as 'Roc' Hudson was in film noir Undertow (1949).

By the early 1950s he was on his way to becoming Hollywood's most bankable male lead, set to make over 70 films in a career spanning three decades.

Movie buffs fondly remember him as earthy young arborist Cary Scott, in the age-discordant romance melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955) opposite 'older woman' Jane Wyman (just eight years his senior at 38) from which this biography takes its name. 

He is equally loved in Giant (1956) with Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. And romantic comedy Pillow Talk (1959) with Doris Day — featuring 'that' split-screen bath scene with them both naked in suds, chatting on a phone party line, which, along with the title, almost didn’t get past the Production Code Administration.

Reading this biography, we are struck by the labour involved in maintaining the illusion. Modern celebrity culture celebrates disclosure, confession and personal branding. Classic Hollywood demanded the opposite. Secrecy was currency. Publicists managed narratives with military discipline. Careers could be wrecked by gossip that would barely raise an eyebrow today.

Hudson became one of the greatest beneficiaries of this arrangement, yet one of its worst casualties.

Griffin handles these complexities with admirable restraint, neither sanctifying nor condemning his subject. Instead, we encounter a man who could be generous, lonely, affectionate, ambitious and emotionally elusive, sometimes all at once.

Different witnesses describe different versions of Hudson. Former lovers recall one person, friends another, colleagues yet another. The resulting portrait feels appropriately fragmented. Rather than solving the mystery, the author demonstrates why the mystery existed in the first place.

One of the book's more fascinating aspects is its portrait of Hollywood itself. The supporting cast are as compelling as the star: agents, producers, studio execs and fellow actors pass through the pages like denizens of a lost world. The system they inhabited now seems unimaginable: an elaborate theatre of image management in which public identity trumped personal truth.

Hudson's life serves as both participant and cautionary tale within that world.

The biography's middle sections are exhaustive in its treatment of films, productions and career developments. Some readers may find themselves wishing for a quicker route through the mechanics of stardom.

Yet there is a case for this thoroughness. Hudson's professional life was not merely what he did for a living, but the fortress in which he hid. Each film role, publicity shot and choreographed 'romance' formed part of a larger architecture designed to protect both the man and the myth.

The book gains particular emotional power in its later chapters. As Hudson ages, his fame dims, the AIDS crisis starts reshaping public conversation, and the story acquires a tragic inevitability.

The author explores the actor's final years with restraint and sympathy, showing how Hudson's illness transformed not only perceptions of the star himself but also public awareness of the epidemic.

What emerges is not merely a celebrity biography but a study of performance itself. Hudson spent a lifetime acting both on screen and off. The tragedy is not that he played a role. Most people do. The tragedy is that circumstances required the performance to continue long after the cameras stopped rolling.

Griffin's achievement lies in recognising that Hudson's story cannot be reduced to a simple narrative of victimhood, triumph or hypocrisy. Humans are rarely so tidy. Hudson was a beneficiary of the very system that constrained him. He helped sustain the illusion that trapped him and enjoyed immense privilege while enduring profound loneliness.

In the end, All That Heaven Allows becomes a meditation on identity, fame and the often-painful distance between public perception and private reality. Griffin's work is compassionate without being sentimental, critical without being cynical, and scholarly without losing sight of the human heart at its centre.

Rock Hudson remains in some respects unknowable. Perhaps that is inevitable. Some people spend their lives constructing walls so carefully that even the most diligent biographer cannot wholly dismantle them.

This book illuminates the outline of the man standing behind those walls and allows us to briefly glimpse the cost of their construction.

A deeply researched, compassionate, and often moving biography that captures both the glamour of Old Hollywood and the personal costs of maintaining one of its most famous illusions.

My review of Judith Anderson: Australian Star, First Lady of the American Stage, by Desley Deacon

Judith Anderson: Australian Star, First Lady of the American Stage

by Desley Deacon

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

This had languished on my 'To Read' list for seven years, largely because of its intimidating girth.

At 520 pages, it looked less like a biography and more like a personal challenge. Alas, it proved well worth the wait and all the more rewarding for being savoured at a luxuriously unhurried pace.

For many classic cinema lovers of a certain ilk, Judith Anderson remains forever the unforgettable Mrs. Danvers of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), that chilling housekeeper whose devotion to the tragically drowned first Rebecca de Winter becomes a form of psychological warfare against Joan Fontaine's vulnerable young successor bride.

Others know her as Gene Tierney's formidable aunt Ann Treadwell in Otto Preminger's 1944 breakthrough film noir Laura; or the quietly indomitable matriarch Ida 'Big Mama' Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958).

She is immortalised as ill-fated Egyptian slave-nurse Memnet, pushed off a balcony and killed by Nefretiri (Anne Baxter) in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 biblical epic The Ten Commandments.

Yet as author Desley Deacon demonstrates, those fabled screen appearances represent just a fraction of an illustrious career

Outside of Australia, few of those movie fans of the day realised she was Australian. Fewer still, except theatregoers or aficionados, knew she was also the 'First lady of the American Stage.'

When I mentioned recently to a not unseasoned theatre worker that I was reading this, they asked with sincerity: 'Who's Judith Anderson?'

Before I had quite recovered, another acquaintance wondered if she had been the lead singer of The Seekers. At which point, I felt compelled to retreat to a darkened room with a restorative cup of tea and ... just me and this book.

Veteran stars like Anderson are now a sort of insider secret: if you know, you're of a special vintage. If you don't, then you ought to.

This is precisely why books like Deacon's matter.

This sumptuous profile restores Anderson to her rightful place among the 20th century's performance behemoths. Structured in theatrical 'acts' and 'scenes' and richly illustrated, it tracks the journey of Frances Margaret Anderson, born 1897 in Adelaide — part of the young colony of South Australia with its mere 300,000 inhabitants — who becomes one of the most respected actresses to ever tread Broadway's boards.

The early chapters are among the most absorbing.

We meet 'Fanny' Anderson, youngest of four children, growing up in South Australia after the separation of her parents. Her father, a charismatic gambler and adventurer known as 'The Silver King', deserts the family when she is six, leaving her with only memories of him.

Her resourceful mother Jessie sells almost everything except the family piano and supports the family by running a grocery business.

Fanny emerges as a wilful, high-achieving tomboy who competes with boys and earns the moniker Outlaw Fan. She wags school, loving only its Friday afternoon Penny Concerts. Like many children of her era, she performs in home concerts, but in her case uses her talents to barter with.

Even as a child she seems destined for performance. She wins prizes for singing and recitation, and displays an early determination to carve her own path through life.

Although she has a music teacher, her heart is set on elocution and the art of verse speaking — at the time an essential accomplishment for middle-class girls around the English-speaking world. Her voice coach had studied under the teacher of Lionel Logue, who helped manage King George VI's stammer.

Fanny is soon quoting Shakespeare and winning medals for recitation and singing.

Her theatrical ambitions awaken on seeing Nelly Melba's Adelaide concert in in 1908. Her lifelong love of theatre is sealed that year at J. C. Williamson's Peter Pan, whose star Minnie Tittell Brune flies out on a wire, hovers over the gallery and sprinkles 11-year-old Fanny with stardust.

One of this book's notable strengths is that Deacon never merely catalogues events. She recreates worlds.

The Adelaide and Sydney of Anderson's youth feel tangible and alive. We accompany the ambitious teenager as she relocates to Sydney with her devoted mother, encounters the city's cultural elite, studies acting, and gradually morphs from gifted amateur to arch professional. 

These early chapters filled with sunshine and promise, let us feel the era and settings as if there ourselves, transporting the reader so completely that one almost forgets they are reading a work of scholarship.

That achievement reflects Deacon's gift as a writer. Although an accomplished historian, she is first and foremost a storyteller. Drawing on unpublished memoirs, diaries, correspondence and extensive archival research, she constructs a portrait of rare depth without ever allowing the narrative to become dry or academic.

The Anderson these pages uncovers is ambitious, witty, occasionally difficult, deeply committed to her craft and fascinating.

Arriving in America in 1918, Fanny becomes Judith, steadily establishing a reputation for intelligence, intensity and commanding stage presence. She will eventually stand among theatre royalty, working alongside the likes of Katharine Cornell, Ruth Gordon, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and Lillian Gish.

Anderson's rollcall of achievements is astonishing.

She plays Gertrude opposite Gielgud's Hamlet, Lady Macbeth with Olivier, stars in Chekhov's Three Sisters, tours globally, conquers radio and television and even undertakes a hallowed tour as Hamlet herself. Above all comes Medea, the role most closely associated with her and the performance that secures her place among the finest tragediennes of her time.

Reading these accounts, we start to see why film was always secondary for Anderson. While Hollywood made her famous, theatre made her a legend.

The author does not neglect the private woman behind the public figure. We learn of Anderson's marriages, friendships, disappointments and occasional insecurities. The sacrifices demanded by a life devoted almost entirely to art become increasingly apparent. What we discover is not a remote theatrical monument but a complex, very human individual.

What remains most striking is the scale of Anderson's accomplishment.

Here was a girl from Adelaide who became Broadway's reigning queen for an entire generation, earned Emmy and Tony awards, received an Academy Award nomination, was appointed a Dame Commander of the British Empire and later became a Companion of the Order of Australia. Yet today her name is often met with puzzled looks outside specialist circles.

This written work goes a long way towards correcting that injustice.

By the final curtain, one is left not only admiring Judith Anderson but wondering how such a towering figure could have slipped from public memory. More than a life story, this is a rich history of 20th-century theatre, a portrait of artistic dedication and a reminder that 19th-century-born Australians sometimes ventured far from home and quietly conquered the world.

Through Deacon's elegant storytelling, Judith Anderson steps out from the shadows of old programmes, fading reviews and grainy film appearances to reclaim centre stage. Long after closing the book, I found myself thinking about that determined Adelaide girl who crossed an ocean, remade herself and became one of the most venerated actresses of her generation.

A biography can do no greater service than that.

For lovers of theatre history, Golden Age of Hollywood and great actors' stories, this is an absorbing, elegant and deeply rewarding read.

My review of My Father Bryce, by Adam Courtenay

My Father Bryce

by Adam Courtenay

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

My Father Bryce is a calm, deliberate attempt to understand a man who spent his life shaping stories, including those he told himself about himself. 

Bryce Courtenay’s public identity is familiar to most Australians: bestselling novelist whose books sold in tens of millions, charismatic speaker, and one who dominated the publishing landscape from the release of The Power of One onward. 

Middle son Adam Courtenay’s focus is the private man behind that public one. What emerges is a portrait built from observation rather than accusation.

Bryce’s early life in South Africa was unstable, fatherless and marked by illegitimacy. Those circumstances created a psychological terrain influencing all that followed. From that childhood came the habit his sons later called 'Dad facts', tales that were vivid, dramatic and seldom verifiable. 

Adam presents his father's inventions as acts not of deceit, but a way of managing a reality Bryce found intolerable. He suggests Bryce’s storytelling was a method of holding himself together when facts felt insufficient, a way of creating an endurable version of life.

Prior to being a novelist, Bryce spent three decades in Sydney’s advertising world. A period defined by competition, bravado and constant reinvention. He produced iconic campaigns, clashed with strong personalities and lived a lifestyle that strained his marriage to Benita Solomon. 

Advertising rewarded performance and encouraged the blurring of the line between pitch and persona. As Bryce moved into fiction, those habits migrated. His protagonists often resembled idealised versions of himself, most notably Peekay in The Power of One. 

His public identity became a kind of ongoing presentation. 

Adam writes of this with restraint, describing a father who sought admiration in large quantity and often said whatever was required to secure it.

The memoir’s emotional core lies in its treatment of grief and distance. Bryce’s April Fool’s Day, written after the death of his youngest son Damon, remains one of the most openly vulnerable works in Australian publishing. He grieved publicly and many readers responded to the sincerity of that grief. 

Yet Adam describes a dad who remained unreachable to his surviving sons. The public vulnerability did not translate into private connection. Bryce could make readers feel seen yet struggled to extend this to those closest to him. 

Adam handles this contradiction without bitterness, his tone measured and grounded in reporting rather than recrimination. This absence of anger gives the memoir its strength.

The book also traces the long arc of Bryce’s personal life. His marriage to Benita collapses under the weight of his behaviour. His affairs create further distance within the family. His later marriage to Christine Gee, a near identical twin of one of his former partners, is described by Adam with a mix of detachment and quiet disbelief. 

Adam recalls attending the wedding, feeling like a stranger at an event that should have been intimate. That moment becomes emblematic of the emotional gap that had grown between father and son. 

Our author does not write as one seeking vindication, but an adult attempting to understand a man whose contradictions were too large to ignore and too human to condemn.

Throughout the memoir Adam maintains a disciplined approach, writing with a journalist’s habits of contextualising, verifying and resisting melodrama, and an historian’s patience for contradiction. 

The portrait that emerges is balanced, steady and gently affecting, acknowledging the complexities of loving someone whose strengths and weaknesses are often inseparable, while avoiding the easy binaries that dominate many celebrity‑adjacent memoirs.

My Father Bryce ultimately becomes a study of myth and affection coexisting within one family. It shows how a father can be generous and self‑absorbed, loving and unreachable, a national storyteller and a private fabulist. 

Adam Courtenay's memoir recognises how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves can protect, distort and sometimes define us more completely than hard facts ever could. 

In reconstructing his father, he has done something Bryce himself rarely managed: told the truth without embellishment.

I loved this and found it way superior, nuanced and authentic to any of Bryce Courtenay's actual work.

Bravo!

My review of My Name Is Barbra, by Barbra Streisand

My Name Is Barbra

by Barbra Streisand

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

There are books that arrive like postcards from a life, and those that arrive like the life itself. This one is of the latter.

Though never an ardent fan, I had watched and admired her climb since learning to walk and talk. All of my ilk recalls 'first seen' TV events, e.g. demise of Monroe, Cuban Missile Crisis ... and so we recall 21-year-old Streisand's iconic 6 October 1963 debut on The Judy Garland Show.

I mean, what 4-year-old future 'Freind of Dorothy' would miss The Judy Garland Show? After its Streisand special episode airing date was pre-announced, it was worse than waiting for Santa!

The pair's counterpoint duet of 'Happy Days Are Here Again' and 'Get Happy' are as vivid today as their co-star Ethel Merman's adjoining trio 'There's No Business Like Show Business'.

And so, from knee-high times, my following of this astonishing persona continued, waxing and waning with the tides.

While some memoirs whisper and others confess, more strive to tidy a life into something manageable. My Name Is Barbra does none of these things, arriving as a grand, unapologetic declaration. 

Sprawling, unruly and unwilling to be pressed into margins.

A tome of nearly a thousand pages, from a woman who has spent her entire existence insisting on the right to be fully seen. A 992-page testimony of the ambition, artistry and sheer force of personality that carried her from a Brooklyn tenement to the summits of world entertainment.

The result feels less like a diary than a museum wing dedicated to a singular life.

Her story begins not with fame but with hunger, the kind that shapes a child before they know they are being shaped. The absence of a father, the chill of her mother’s indifference. These scenes read like old film stills, flickering with the ache of a life yet to find its platform. 

I was surprised to discover that her first ambition was to act rather than sing, the latter seemingly eventuating from lack of acting work, necessitous to survive. Her extraordinary timbre, a secondary consideration to her, was what we all first knew her for.

Her infamous perfectionism, control and refusal to bend to expectation, all trace back to these early years. She writes of these times with startling clarity. Her pain is not romanticised but simply remembered, as one remembers the cold of a winter morning long after the frost has melted.

As the journey moves into her ascent: clubs, auditions, the first glimmers of recognition, her voice becomes sharper and more luminous. She narrates her rise with the precision of one who has spent decades defending her choices and spent a lifetime fighting to be understood. 

Celebrity memoirs rarely feel genuinely authored. This one does. She writes about fame not as a coronation, but a shield. Art became the place she could be seen without being hurt.

It is a book that refuses modesty, abbreviation, or to be anything other than Barbra Streisand. This is not vanity, but preservation. A life lived in the spotlight must be archived before others rewrite it. 

Each chapter feels meticulously placed, each anecdote polished like a stone weighing down her pocket for decades. 

She writes not as a celebrity chasing nostalgia, but an archivist of her own experience, cataloguing camera angles, rehearsal tensions, contracts, wins and losses, all preserved like artifacts beneath glass.

In 1962, as a 19-year-old Broadway neophyte in I Can Get It for you Wholesale, her supporting role of put-upon secretary Miss Marmelsstein had been written as a 50-year-old spinster, but was enlarged for Streisand's casting, landing her a Tony Award nomination.

She proudly recalls Bette Davis's 1964 What’s My Line TV panel show comment: 'I've been seeing plays and uh, have fallen madly in love this week with Barbra Streisand … I think she's the most wonderful thing I've ever seen ... I just sat with my mouth open in awe.'

For readers who value screen craft, the author walks us through the makings of Funny Girl (1968), The Way We Were (1973), A Star Is Born (1976) and Yentl (1983) with levels of detail bordering on the forensic. She guides us through the machinery of creation: the lighting, music and emotional calculus of every scene. 

Not content to just recount what happened, she wants us to understand how. The choices, battles, accidents and miracles.

The star confronts her reputation as a diva amid a whirl of irritation and clarification, humour and weary defiance, arguing that that her assertiveness has long been misread through gendered lenses. 

She knows the word has followed her like a shadow and she knows why: visionary men are tagged geniuses; visionary women are problems.

We read how the Funny Girl stage version had endured protracted out-of-town tryouts, cuts and changes before its 26 March 1963 opening at the Winter Garden Theatre, NYC. She mentions tense onstage dynamics between herself and male lead Sydney (son of Charlie) Chaplin. 

The reader can't help but wonder if that was one example of how, even as a novice leading lady, her creative pushiness rankled with her more established male elders. But Streisand has stated on record that the problem wasn't hers but Chaplin's (much of his material was cut) and that she admired him.

In fact, Variety reported on June 23, 1965, that Chaplin denied rumours he was leaving Funny Girl earlier than contracted due any dispute with Streisand, maintaining that his clash was with the producer, Ray Stark.

Her memoir becomes, in part, a reclamation project, a voice insisting on the right to define her own narrative after decades of being defined by others.

Is it long? Exhaustingly so. A doorstop with a pulse. But its length becomes part of its character, like the ornate spine of an old volume that refuses to be slimmed down for convenience. 

You don’t read this for efficiency; you read it to sit patiently as she tells you all she has ever wanted you to know. You don't read it quickly, you inhabit it.

She has lived a life at full blast, so tells it out loud accordingly. Her winding digressions, protracted parentheses, catalogues of furnishings, salads and wig fibres, become part of the charm.

A feast and a test of endurance, self‑mythology and self‑correction. A diva’s gospel and a woman’s reckoning. It is, above all, unmistakably Barbra: brilliant, controlling, funny, wounded yet triumphant.

It is rare to encounter a memoir where the craft is given as much reverence as the fame. Here, the craft is the fame.

In the end this feels like a well restored sepia photo: cracks still visible, colours still muted, but the subject unmistakably alive. An account of a woman who refused to dim her light for anyone.

As others have noted: if it's modesty you seek, you will not find it here. If it's Barbra, she's with you on every page.

My review of The Mitford Girls: The Biography of an Extraordinary Family, by Mary S. Lovell

The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell 

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I had already read and loved this, and the same author's brilliant Bess of Hardwick: First Lady of Chatsworth.

Then, with the global streaming release of TV drama series Outrageous, I had to re-read this old Mitford favourite of mine on which the series is based, if just to touch base and catch up.

The Mitford Girls will not sit quietly on a shelf. It is too large, strange, glittering and troubling for that, sprawling decades, continents and the emotional topography of one of Britain’s most improbable families.

Reading it is like entering a salon, courtroom and psych-lab.

Lovell’s achievement is not just telling a story of six extraordinary sisters, but in a way that accommodates their glamour, complexities and mythic afterlife.

She begins with the sisters' childhoods, which feel almost fictional. They grew up in a household both privileged and chaotic, presided over by a father whose volcanic temper was matched only by his idiosyncratic opinions, and a mother whose gentility seemingly existed in steady counterpoint to the noise around her.

There was little formal schooling, much emotional turbulence and an atmosphere that encouraged imagination and rebellion. It is tempting to treat these childhoods as charmingly unconventional, but Lovell resists the urge to romanticise.

She shows how the absence of structure produced brilliance and vulnerability, how the emotional volatility of their father shaped their lifelong patterns of loyalty and defiance, and how the insular aristocratic world the girls inhabited became the crucible for their later escapades.

Nancy, the eldest, emerges first. Her wit became legendary, her novels sparkling with the brittle joy of aristocratic satire. Her ability to transform family foibles and eccentricities into literature remains unmatched.

Lovell never shies away from Nancy’s cruelty, personal manipulations or bitterness that coloured her later years. She became a woman whose brilliance was inseparable from her wounds; who could turn pain into prose but not always into wisdom; a shining chronicler of her era, shaped its storms. A case study of talent and trauma combined.

Diana is more difficult, approached with clarity and restraint. Her beauty and intellect were undeniable, as was her extremism. Her relationship with Sir Oswald Mosley, embrace of fascism and unrepentant convictions are presented without the sensationalism or moral condemnation readers might predict. Lovell’s tone is measured, allowing Diana's record to speak for itself.

We recognise the seriousness of Diana’s choices and the need to confront the political catastrophe she helped enable. We note the tragic glamour of her trajectory — a woman whose beauty became entangled with darkness. Diana is a puzzle whose emotional needs, social environment and personal charisma render her susceptible to Mosley's magnetism.

Unity is the most troubling, handled with forensic calm. Her infatuation with Hitler, immersion in his inner-circle and horrendously botched suicide attempt after Britain declared war, are recounted sans melodrama. Lovell neither rehabilitates nor sensationalises her, instead painting a youth whose mental fragility and susceptibility make her sad rather than monstrous, and vulnerable to extremism. The operatic scale of her downfall is heart wrenching.

Jessica ('Decca') provides the balance to Diana and Unity. Her elopement to the Spanish Civil War and later life transformation to American civil‑rights crusader are among the book’s most compelling episodes. Lovell clearly admires Decca’s clarity and moral courage, while avoiding her sanctification. 

Decca’s estrangement from family, sometimes doctrinaire leftism and complex relationship with her past are nuanced. She is the rebel, the family conscience, the sister who most fully escapes her past.

Deborah ('Debo'), the youngest, often treated in Mitford lore as the sensible one, avoided scandal and ideological fervour. Lovell’s portrait of her is affectionate if not simplistic. Deborah's upward marriage into the Devonshires, stewardship of Chatsworth, and role as quiet yet influential figure of British cultural life, is pleasantly explored. No political firebrand or literary genius, she was a force of her own.

Pamela ('Woman'), the least famous, receives a rich, respectful treatment, with Lovell resisting the tendency to treat her as merely the 'quiet' Mitford. She is here presented as a woman whose life, though less dramatic than her sisters’, was shaped by its own forms of hardiness and peculiarity.

One strength of this biography is its refusal to reduce the sisters to archetypes. They have often been reduced to shorthand: Nancy the wit, Diana the fascist, Unity the Nazi, Decca the communist, Debo the duchess, and Pamela the retiring one.

Lovell dismantles these caricatures without denying their underlying truths. The sisters emerge not as symbols but as people — brilliant, infuriating, contradictory and unforgettable.

Reading The Mitford Girls now, one is struck by how modern the sisters seem. Their lives anticipate our contemporary fascination with celebrity, ideology and personal reinvention.

They were early prototypes of the scandal‑driven storytelling that fuels TV series like Outrageous, where glamour and catastrophe merge, and personal charisma becomes inseparable from public spectacle.

The Mitfords lived their lives in public long before TV existed, and this book captures the theatricality that made them irresistible to journalists, novelists and biographers.

Lovell’s achievement is not that she resolves the contradictions of the Mitfords, but that she renders them legible without diminishing their mystery. Her biography is elegant without being indulgent, serious without being dour, and psychologically rich without being speculative.

The Mitford girls were extraordinary. Emblematic of privilege, rebellion, the seductive pull of ideology and the ways in which personality can steer performance.

Here is a portrait of six women who lived at the intersection of history, whose lives illuminated the 20th century’s darkest corners and brightest parlours, and whose legacy shimmers in our imagination.

This stands out from other Mitford biographies. I loved reading it both times.

A perfect 'companion read' to this, with an insider peep into 'Mitfordese' parlance, is The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Diana Mitford's daughter-in-law Charlotte Mosley.

My review of From Mud Hut to Star Wars and Beyond, by Femi Taylor

From Mud Hut to Star Wars and Beyond

by Femi Taylor

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Femi Taylor is, like so many entertainment figures, so much more than her fanbase sees.

She has lived for decades in the peculiar half‑light of cultural visibility — instantly recognisable yet largely unexamined, iconic yet misunderstood. 

To millions of Star Wars aficionados she is Oola, Jabba the Hutt's green‑skinned Twi'lek slave dancer, swallowed up in a momentary flash of movement that earned cult status.

But the woman behind that image has travelled way further, through landscapes of loss, reinvention and artistic grit that makes her familiar story of sci‑fi fame feel almost incidental. 

Her memoir is not a celebrity artefact but a reclamation — a deliberate, unhurried stitching together of a life lived across continents, cultures and identities.

Taylor’s beginnings are almost unbearably stark. Born in a mud hut in Ajao, Southern Nigeria, she enters the world beside her twin brother Tim, both covered with flies, her dead mother Felicia Omoniyi lying in a pool of blood, a scene that hits us with the blunt force of witness testimony.

Their grief-stricken father, overwhelmed and impoverished with an already extensive family to provide for, sees no choice but to surrender the twins to a Catholic orphanage run by Irish sisters in Ibadan. 

It is a story shaped not only by personal tragedy but by the long tail of colonialism, missionary intervention and the fragile infrastructures of post‑independence Nigeria. 

Taylor’s early life sits at the intersection of global forces — poverty, migration, religious charity — that continue to shape the trajectories of countless children around the planet. She does not theorise this; she simply lives it. But the sociocultural resonance is unmistakable.

Adoption into a cultivated Hampstead, UK, household brings safety, education and opportunity — but also dislocation. Taylor grows up between worlds: Nigerian by birth, British by upbringing, and never entirely at ease in either. 

Her childhood becomes a case study in the quiet ache of transracial adoption, the unspoken labour of navigating identity in a society that still struggles to understand the complexities of belonging. 

She learns early that identity is not a fixed inheritance but a negotiation — a shifting, sometimes fragile balance between origin and environment.

Her artistic life unfolds with the same candour. Taylor’s West End years — Bubbling Brown Sugar, Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar et al, the London Palladium, the Royal Albert Hall — are described with affectionate insider detail. 

But beneath the backstage camaraderie lies a deeper sociocultural story: the emergence of the 'triple threat' performer in the late 20th century, the intensifying demands placed on dancers’ bodies, and the unspoken racial dynamics of British theatre. 

Taylor’s presence in these spaces — a Black woman navigating overwhelmingly white institutions — is quietly radical. She does not frame it as such, but the reader cannot miss the significance. 

Her memoir becomes a window into the lived experience of performers who must excel not only artistically but socially, negotiating stereotypes, expectations and the subtle pressures of representation.

The camaraderie she describes — intense, fleeting, forged under pressure — speaks to the emotional architecture of theatre: a world where 'ships‑in‑the‑night' relationships form and dissolve with each production. 

It is a portrait of an industry that offers both sanctuary and precarity, community and exhaustion. Taylor writes about these dynamics with a gentle frankness, never romanticising the grind but never diminishing the joy either.

Return of the Jedi enters the memoir almost sideways. Taylor treats her cult status with amused detachment. She knows Oola is iconic, but she also knows the role is a sliver of her life, not its defining feature. 

Yet the sociocultural implications are worth lingering on. Oola is one of the earliest Black women in the Star Wars universe — a franchise that has long struggled with representation. Taylor’s brief appearance became a paradox: hyper‑visible yet narratively disposable, adored yet marginal. 

Her memoir does not integrate this directly, but the magazine‑profile lens allows us to see the broader pattern: how Black performers in global franchises often become symbols without agency, remembered for moments rather than careers.

Her recollections of Star Wars creator George Lucas, Dame Gillian Lynne, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sir Cameron Mackintosh and the constellation of colleagues around them are refreshingly egalitarian. Fame is not a hierarchy she subscribes to; people are people, whether household names or backstage stalwarts. 

This refusal to differentiate becomes a quiet act of resistance against the celebrity economy itself. 

The photo inserts — tastefully placed at the end — reinforce this democratic stance. Shakespearean thespian Brian Blessed OBE, heavy metal icon Meat Loaf, Jeff Goldblum, beloved Queen legend Freddie Mercury, Luke Skywalker alter ego Mark Hamill, Jedi buddy Billy Dee Williams, The Fonz himself Henry Winkler, Lou Diamond Phillips, Giancarlo Esposito: they appear not as trophies but as fellow travellers, part of Femi's long, improbable journey.

What ultimately distinguishes Taylor’s memoir is its spiritual undercurrent. She writes with a gentleness that never tips into sentimentality, a humility that feels earned rather than performed. 

Her penned reflections on identity, belonging and the slow work of becoming, echo the quiet wisdom of that other indomitable soul sister, the late great Dr Maya Angelo. This is where the memoir transcends genre. It becomes not a celebrity narrative but a meditation on what it means to build a life from fragments.

Her story is not linear but layered, recursive, shaped by the ongoing negotiation between past and present.

In a publishing landscape crowded with celebrity quick‑reads, From Mud Hut to Star Wars and Beyond feels like an outlier: intimate without indulgence, candid without spectacle, and quietly luminous. 

The author emerges not as a footnote in a blockbuster franchise but as a woman who has lived many lives and learned to inhabit them all. Her memoir becomes a case study in the politics of visibility, the sociology of performance and the psychology of belonging. 

This is a story of survival without bitterness, resilience without bravado, and success without vanity — a long and winding journey that earns each word of the book's subtitle: A Memoir of Identity, Belonging and Becoming.

Femi Taylor is, at the end of the day: an orphan, loving adoptee and family member, multi-genre dancer, singer, sometime actress, reluctant catwalk model, wife, adoring mother, interior designer, property developer and global citizen … all with Buddhist highlights.

What more could a reader want?

My review of The Light of Day: The First Man to Come Out at the Dawn of Gay Liberation, by Christopher Stephens & Louise Radnofsky

The Light of Day: The First Man to Come Out at the Dawn of Gay Liberation

by Christopher Stephens & Louise Radnofsky

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I felt this was a timely read for the 2026 WorldPride events.

There are moments in history when private lives, long lived in the shadows, suddenly become legible. Not because the world has changed, but because someone has taken the risk of speaking plainly.

In The Light of Day, Christopher Stephens and Louise Radnofsky trace one such moment — and the long, complicated life that surrounded it — through the story of Roger Butler, a blind gay activist whose papers, recordings and memories form one of the most intimate archives of queer life in postwar Britain.

The book begins not with a political rally or a courtroom, but with a small, unassuming house in east Oxford. It is the early 2000s. Christopher Stephens, then a young student, has been asked by a friend to visit a man in his sixties and read to him.

The request is simple enough, but the man — Roger Butler — wants to know one thing before he agrees: Is he one of us? The question lands with the weight of decades. For Butler, 'one of us' is not merely a matter of identity; it is a matter of safety, trust, and the possibility of being understood without translation.

Christopher passes the test. And so begins a friendship that will shape the rest of his life — and, eventually, this book.

Stephens’s early visits are tentative. Butler is wary, proud, and accustomed to disappointment. But slowly, over bottles of red wine and readings of Alan Hollinghurst and Edmund White, the two men settle into a rhythm: Stephens reads aloud, Butler listens, interrupts, laughs, corrects, remembers.

Sometimes he asks Stephens to read his own autobiographical essays — fragments of a life lived in secrecy, danger and occasional exhilaration.

These scenes form the emotional core of The Light of Day. They are quiet, domestic, almost mundane. Yet they carry a charge that is unmistakably political. In a world where gay men had long been forced to hide, the simple act of reading aloud becomes a kind of reclamation. It is companionship as resistance, intimacy as testimony.

Stephens writes of discovering, for the first time, what it felt like to belong to a 'tribe.' The word is striking. It suggests not only solidarity but relief — the relief of finding people who understand the contours of your life without needing them explained.

For Butler, whose youth was spent in a Britain where homosexuality was illegal, that relief had been rare. For Stephens, it arrives in the form of an older man who has lived through the worst of it and survived.

To understand Butler’s life, one must understand the world he grew up in. Homosexuality remained illegal in Britain until 1967, and the law’s hostility shaped every aspect of gay existence.

Men lived with the constant threat of police raids, public shaming, loss of employment, and imprisonment. The Wolfenden Report of 1957 recommended decriminalisation, but the government refused to act. The Homosexual Law Reform Society was founded in response, staffed largely by volunteers who risked their reputations simply by being associated with it.

It was in this climate that Butler, on 3 June 1960, joined two colleagues in writing a letter to British national newspapers including politically conservative The Spectator. It began with startling simplicity:

'Sir, we are homosexuals…'

The sentence is almost disarmingly plain. Yet its plainness is precisely what made it radical. The three men signed their real names. They did so knowing that the police could investigate them, that employers could dismiss them, that families could disown them.

It was an act of moral clarity so rare that it reads now like a flare shot up from the darkness.

Stephens and Radnofsky treat this moment not as a historical footnote but as a hinge — a point at which private suffering tipped into public courage. They show how acts of self‑declaration, so dangerous then, would become central to later movements for equality.

Butler’s letter is presented as both a personal risk and a political tactic, a gesture that looked forward to battles still decades away.

Butler’s blindness, which struck in his thirties, adds another layer of complexity to the story. It narrowed his world but sharpened his voice. He became, in effect, a writer without a readership — a man who filled notebooks, tapes and diaries with reflections on his parents, his loneliness, his friendships, his activism, and the strange, stubborn hope that carried him through the years.

When Butler died in 2011, he left all his papers to Stephens. The archive was vast, chaotic, and deeply personal. It contained not only autobiographical essays but home recordings — crackly, imperfect, sometimes moving, sometimes mundane. In one of the final recordings, Butler says he does not regret going blind because it led him to Oxford, and to Stephens.

It is a line that lands softly but stays with you.

The authors approach this archive with care, not attempting to impose a single narrative on Butler’s life but instead letting the fragments speak. The telling swings between eras — the fearful 1950s and '60s, the more permissive but still complicated early 2000s — with a looseness that feels organic rather than disorganised; a structure that mirrors how memory works: associative, wandering, occasionally contradictory.

Here, legacy media reviewers have been perceptive. Matthew Parris, in the Times Literary Supplement, notes that Stephens 'never entirely works out what kind of book he meant to write.' This is meant not as criticism but as praise. The book’s refusal to settle into a single genre — biography, memoir, social history, personal tribute — becomes its strength. It mirrors the very life it describes: untidy, searching, full of digressions and sudden illuminations.

One of the book’s most striking qualities is its insistence that political change is not only the work of committees and campaigns but of friendships. Stephens’s weekly visits to Butler’s home are not framed as heroic. They are ordinary acts of care.

Yet in the context of Butler’s life, they become extraordinary. They offer companionship in a world that had often denied it. They offer recognition in a world that had often refused it.

This suggests that visibility — the act of being seen — is one of the most radical experiences a person can have. Butler’s life was shaped by the danger of visibility. Stephens’s life was shaped by the relief of it. Their friendship becomes a bridge between these two realities.

Radnofsky’s contribution ensures that the story never loses sight of the broader context. She supplies the historical scaffolding — the Wolfenden Report, the founding of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, the slow path to decriminalisation — with clarity and restraint. The political never overwhelms the personal; it frames it.

Although The Light of Day is rooted in the past, it speaks directly to the present. In an era when LGBTQIA+ rights are again contested in parts of the world, Butler’s story feels less like distant history and more like a reminder of how fragile progress can be.

The account shows that liberation was not inevitable. It was built by people who risked their jobs, their reputations and their freedom simply by telling the truth.

Stephens and Radnofsky do not indulge in triumphalism. They acknowledge the reactionary undercurrents that persisted long after 1967, and the loneliness that shaped Butler’s life even in more permissive decades.

Never quite bleak it is, in its way, a celebration: of friendship, of intellectual companionship, of the small acts of loyalty that sustain a person through difficult years.

In the end, The Light of Day is about seeing and being seen. It is about the courage required to make oneself visible in a hostile world, and the quieter courage of showing up for someone who has lived too long in the dark.

It is a tribute to a man who wrote in the margins, who risked everything by signing his name, and who found, late in life, a companion willing to read him back into the world.

Stephens and Radnofsky have written a book that glows with understated grace. It does not try to dazzle. It pays attention — to a life, to a friendship, to the long, slow arc of change. And in that attention, it finds its light.

The back cover comment by Sir Ian McKellen reads: 'Your book is the "really good book. Just one" that Roger Butler would have wanted.'

I agree.

A beautiful, heartwarming read about friendship.

My review of A Recipe for Murder, by Duncan Mcnab

A Recipe for Murder

by Duncan Mcnab

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

The 2023 Erin Patterson mushroom murder case gripped not just Australia but the world, spawning months of newsreel, podcasts and online debate, attracting near comparable public attention to the 1982 Lindy 'a dingo ate my baby' Chamberlain case. There's even an ABC drama series in the works, aptly entitled: Toxic.

So, it seems right and natural that this author, an old hand at true crime, should attend the court hearings and research the town of Leongatha, Patterson's family and history, with his usual expertise.

It has often been said there's a peculiar intimacy to crimes that happen in kitchens: the choreography of hands, the small rituals of preparation, the way ordinary gestures can be turned into instruments. 

Duncan McNab’s A Recipe for Murder takes that intimacy and tilts it until the familiar becomes uncanny, tracing a case where domestic routine and lethal intent meet with devastating clarity. 

The book reads like a slow, precise unpeeling of a life — layer by layer — until the raw, exposed truth is left trembling on the page.

McNab writes with the authority of someone who has spent years watching how investigations unfold. He reconstructs scenes with a reporter’s fidelity to fact and a novelist’s ear for the telling detail: the texture of a sauce, the smell of mushrooms, the small, almost accidental choices that accumulate into motive and method. 

These sensory particulars do more than decorate the narrative; they become the book’s moral compass, guiding the reader through the ordinary textures of family life toward the extraordinary consequences that follow when trust is weaponised.

The hush of the kitchen — the clink of a spoon, the slow slide of a lid, steam fogging a window — is a recurring motif, and McNab uses it to remarkable effect. He lingers on domestic minutiae not as filler but as evidence: grocery lists, recipes, polite exchanges at the dinner table are all clues in a human drama. 

In his hands the kitchen becomes a stage where motive and method are both cooked and consumed, and the reader learns to read the ordinary as if it were a ledger of intent.

What distinguishes McNab’s account is its restraint. He resists the sensational turn that so often marks true-crime retellings, preferring instead a cool patience. The legal machinery — the police work, the forensic tests, the courtroom choreography — is laid out with clarity and respect for complexity, never reduced to melodrama. 

This measured approach allows the human elements to breathe: grief, denial, the small hypocrisies and loyalties that complicate any neat assignment of guilt. The result is a narrative that feels both rigorous and humane.

Characterisation is subtle rather than theatrical. McNab sketches the people involved with an economy that trusts the reader to fill in the spaces: the accused are not monsters on a stage but people whose ordinary habits and private resentments become legible under scrutiny. 

Victims, jurors, lawyers and investigators are rendered as fallible, complicated beings rather than mere archetypes. 

This humane restraint deepens the moral ambiguity at the heart of the story: culpability is not a single, bright line but a series of shadows and reflections.

The book balances procedural chronology with intimate domestic vignettes, and that alternation keeps the narrative taut. McNab’s prose is spare and precise; he lets scenes accumulate rather than insisting on rhetorical flourish. 

The legal passages are lucid without being dry, and the procedural detail never overwhelms the human story. There is a clear respect for the reader’s intelligence throughout: the book explains what must be explained and leaves the rest to the reader’s imagination.

McNab’s attention to texture is one of the book’s most haunting qualities. He lingers over the sensory — the smell of mushrooms, the way a sauce thickens, the tactile certainty of a knife in the hand — and these details become instruments of suspense. They do not merely set scene; they map motive. 

The ordinary becomes ominous because McNab shows how easily domestic acts can be repurposed into instruments of harm. That transformation is the book’s central, chilling insight.

The narrative’s coolness is a deliberate choice that often serves the subject. A crime executed with clinical deliberation is best examined with a steady hand, and McNab has it. 

Yet there are moments when this very steadiness can feel like distance. The refusal to indulge melodrama is admirable, but occasionally a sharper emotional edge might have made the stakes feel more immediate. 

Even so, the restraint is more often an asset, mirroring the methodical nature of the investigation and the quiet, bureaucratic rhythms of the courtroom.

McNab’s reporting is patient and measured. He reconstructs the meals, the markets, the small decisions that accumulate into catastrophe, and he does so without the breathless cadence of tabloid retelling. 

Instead, the book offers a steady accumulation of small facts and human moments that, together, form a convincing portrait of how a murder could be both planned and hidden in plain sight. 

The reader is invited to watch the slow unravelling, to notice the tiny misalignments that, when added together, become decisive.

There is also a moral seriousness to this work. He refuses easy answers and resists the temptation to turn people into symbols. The book asks the reader to sit with ambiguity: to feel sympathy and suspicion in the same breath, to understand that culpability can be braided through everyday life. 

This ethical complexity is one of the book’s strengths; it makes the narrative feel less like a verdict and more like an inquiry into the human condition.

The courtroom scenes are handled with the same measured craft as the domestic ones. The author does not dramatise legal procedure for effect; he renders it as a sequence of human decisions, technical tests and rhetorical manoeuvres. 

The law appears not as an abstract moral arbiter but as a human institution, fallible and procedural, where truth is teased out through cross-examination, expert testimony and the slow accretion of evidence. That depiction lends the book a sober realism: justice is not a sudden revelation but a painstaking construction.

For readers who come to true crime seeking gore or spectacle, A Recipe for Murder will be a different sort of satisfaction: a slow, exacting unravelling that rewards attention. 

For those who appreciate prose that attends to the small, telling details of life, McNab’s work will feel like a well-made dish — composed, balanced, and quietly devastating. 

The book does not promise catharsis; it offers instead a careful, literate excavation of a case that is as much about ordinary human routines as it is about the extraordinary consequences that can follow when those routines are weaponised.

In the end, the book’s quiet power lies in its refusal to sensationalise. It treats its subjects with a kind of austere compassion and trusts the reader to sit with the discomfort that follows. 

A Recipe for Murder is a work of attentive reporting and disciplined storytelling: a book that reads like a well-composed dish, balanced in flavour and devastating in its aftertaste. 

It is a study in contrasts — warmth against chill, patience against sudden loss — and it leaves the reader with the uneasy knowledge that the most intimate spaces of our lives can also be the most dangerous.

If this author’s aim is to make us look again at the ordinary and see how easily it can be turned lethal, he succeeds. This is not a book that will be devoured in a single breathless sitting; it is one to be read slowly, with attention to the small, telling details. 

In that slow reading there is a kind of moral education: a reminder that the domestic is never merely domestic, and that the rituals of everyday life can, in the wrong hands, become instruments of ruin.

I've enjoyed several of Duncan McNab's true crime books, most notably The Usual Suspect: The Life of Abe Saffron (2005); Killing Mr Rent-a-Kill (2012); Roger Rogerson: From Hero Cop to Convicted Murderer – The Inside Story (2016) and Getting Away with Murder (2017).

This latest kept me up late for weeks.