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‘Who’s Who in the Modern British Marriage?’ asked the
Observer Magazine of 29 December 1968. Earlier that year, on the 50th anniversary of votes for women, they had published a questionnaire by the US Maferr Foundation to find out such things as ‘Who makes the decisions? Who works and how do they feel about it? Who sets out for self-improvement and who backs it?’
‘The Forsytes,’ reported Maureen Green, referring to
The Forsyte Saga, a popular TV show of the time, ‘wouldn’t have understood one important finding of our survey: the healthy democratic condition of the average British middle-class marriage. Paternal tyrants – as well as dominating wives – are in the minority in working out who decides what in the marriage.’
Letters: Diana â the dream and the reality
Perhaps the ordinariness of her statue befits a princess who shone so brightly that she cast a disproportionate shadow
The statue of Diana, Princess of Wales, at the sunken garden of Londonâs Kensington Palace. Photograph: Guy Bell/REX/Shutterstock
The statue of Diana, Princess of Wales, at the sunken garden of Londonâs Kensington Palace. Photograph: Guy Bell/REX/Shutterstock
Sun 11 Jul 2021 01.00 EDT
Consensus in the press finds Dianaâs statue âdullâ, lacking âvitalityâ and âfrumpyâ and it may be true that part of the explanation is that the âenergy and purpose have been drained out of the art formâ (âDiana, Wollstonecraft, Wilde⦠why do we keep getting it so wrong with our statues?â, News). There is, however, a more fundamental problem. The idea of Diana, Princess of Wales, was always more significant than the real person. Even in an era of hyper-celebrity, few
Alexander Bland profiled Rudolf Nureyev for the
Observer Magazine of 2 July 1972 (‘Nureyev: the Leap that Lasted’) on the eve of the London premiere of the first full-length film about him,
I Am a Dancer. The leap in the headline referred to his defection to the west from Russia in 1961 when he was in a touring troupe in Paris.
Nureyev, then 33, was a global phenomenon, who ‘would make the international headlines if he fell off a bicycle’, wrote Bland. Amazingly there were those who had predicted a ‘quick decline into obscurity’, but he’d been a superstar for 11 years. His ‘softest smile seems to hint at hidden daggers. It was this mixture of gentleness and potential violence that led many writers to compare him to a jungle cat, and it exerts a potent sex-appeal’.