Sublime

"Charlotte Backson, who first was called Comtesse de la Fere, and afterwards Milady de Winter, Baroness of Sheffield."

All children want to be ordinary, and she never was, and that had been difficult – but all adults want to be extraordinary, and now she amplifies her strangeness, delighting in her ignorance of worldly matters and her tendency to speak sometimes in a biblical cadence, telling men she meets that she was born in 1887 (this being the year they dug Bet

summer resort—just Girls and Girls and Girls—and

‘She’s a bit of a coquette, you know.’ ‘Don’t say that – don’t say that!’ Mrs Marden murmured. ‘The nicest girls always are – just a little,’ I was magnanimous enough to plead. ‘Then why are they always punished?’ The intensity of the question startled me – it had come out in a vivid flash. Therefore I had to think a moment before I put to her: ‘Wh

Terry's smile

Fairy tales are weird, distilled expressions of our inherited desires, and the Dead Girl Show, with its idyllic, uncanny small-town setting, is absolutely in the same tradition—it is no wonder that Sigmund Freud believed fairy tales could be interpreted like collective dreams.

Among the young men their friends and neighbours, the belle jeunesse of the Colony, there were many excellent fellows, several devoted swains, and some two or three who enjoyed the reputation of universal charmers and conquerors. But the home-bred arts and the somewhat boisterous gallantry of those honest young colonists were completely eclipsed by

She was Melissa’s oldest, boldest friend. They had gone to the same primary school. Hazel worked in advertising. She had a wide and glamorous smile behind which was an oft-foul tongue, and long, bouncing, half-French, half-Ghanaian curls falling down her back, the most beautiful, the most envied of their schoolgirl pack, the one the boys always wen