Tag Archives: Elizabeth Taylor

The New York Times Book Review – February 18, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (February 16, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Philip Gefter’s sizzling, “unapologetically obsessive” new book, “Cocktails With George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” Our critic Alexandra Jacobs calls it “a shot glass filled with one work that, alongside contemporaneous books like Richard Yates’s novel ‘Revolutionary Road’ and Betty Friedan’s polemic ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ showed how the ‘cartoon versions of marriage’ long served up by American popular culture always came with a secret side of bitters.”

Filming ‘Virginia Woolf,’ the Battles Weren’t Just Onscreen

A black and white photograph of the actors Richard Burton, left, and Elizabeth Taylor, at right, staring at each other with a very bright light occupying the middle distance behind them. The image is cropped and repeated to resemble a strip of film.

With Burton and Taylor as stars and a writer and director feuding, adapting the scabrous play wasn’t easy. “Cocktails With George and Martha” pours out the details.

‘Neighbors’ Opens the Door to a Literary Career Cut Short

An illustration is made up of three panels showing, from left: The red silhouette of a walking woman, who is slowly fading away; a partially open dormitory door with a red pennant on its front and a shadow creeping on the floor from inside; and a close-up of a Black hand on a brown background.

A story collection from Diane Oliver, who died at 22, locates the strength in Black families surviving their separate but equal surroundings.

By Alexandra Jacobs

Writer, Mother, Ex-Wife: Leslie Jamison Is a Self in ‘Splinters’

In her powerful new memoir, the author examines a life composed of conflicting identities — and fierce, contradictory desires.

Preview: London Review Of Books – Nov 16, 2023

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London Review of Books (LRB) – November 16, 2023: The latest issue feature The Inside Story of the NHS Infected Blood Scandal; Elizabeth Taylor’s Magic; The UK government has become increasingly hostile to Freedom of Information requests on arms, and more…

Bad Blood – ‘We’ve messed up, boys’

‘In the UK between 1970 and 1991, about 1250 people with bleeding disorders were infected with HIV (and many of them with Hepatitis C, too); by the time the Infected Blood Inquiry began, about three-quarters had died, the majority of them from HIV-related causes.

By Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

The Poison Line: A True Story of Death, Deception and Infected Blood 
by Cara McGoogan.

Death in the Blood: The Inside Story of the NHS Infected Blood Scandal 
by Caroline Wheeler.

Elizabeth Taylor’s Magic

‘Nearly eighty years after she first starred in a film, Taylor is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men.’

By Bee Wilson