SIR – The scandalous inflated rates that NHS hospitals are paying for agency doctors (report, December 12) reflect the significant and long-standing under-provision of staff.
Agatha Christie’s memoirs about her travels to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan
Agatha Christie was already well known as a crime writer when she accompanied her husband, Max Mallowan, to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s. She took enormous interest in all his excavations, and when friends asked what her strange life was like, she decided to answer their questions in this delightful book.
First published in 1946, Come, Tell Me How You Live is now reissued in B format. It gives a charming picture of Agatha Christie herself, and is, as Jacquetta Hawkes concludes in her Introduction, ‘a pure pleasure to read’.
From the NS archive: Here s mud on your mink 7 April 1956: Was there ever a naughty, flighty lipstick?
By Marghanita Laski
By the 1960s, the writer Marghanita Laski was a prolific contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, and in this NS piece from 1956 she deploys her rigorous linguistic analysis. With wry, spiky wit, Laski systematically dissects a new lipstick advert that proclaims, among other things, that “Dreamy pink can lead to mink”. There is, Laski writes, “real meaning” in advertising copy. The lipstick’s “naughtiness” and “flightiness” must, she infers, “transfer from lipstick to reader, since a naughty (or flighty) lipstick could only be one that behaved unpredictably, stuck in its tube or changed its colour”. So what are the “good things” that will “come your way” on purchasing Dreamy Pink? And who is the “girl in the mink”?