Willem Dafoe plays a poet rediscovered late in life

“There’s a marvellous tenderness and generosity to this elegant tale of autumnal regret; an intimate movie acted with effortless grace by Willem Dafoe,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. 

Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, an ageing New Yorker who works for the post office, living alone in a small, book-filled room, drinking and playing pool with his friends in the evening.

One day, he is amazed to be accosted by “a dandyish young hipster” outside his apartment building; this is Meyers (Edmund Donovan), who has found Saxberger’s long-since out-of-print volume of poems. He declares him a neglected genius; he and his rich, “callow and excitable” literary friends take up his cause, and want to use their connections to get him republished.

Amused, and more thrilled than he wants to let on, Saxberger finds the attention of these young people dizzying – particularly because one of them, a beautiful and volatile actress (the “superb” Greta Lee), has “a kittenish crush” on him.

Director Kent Jones has great fun with these “achingly mannered” aesthetes, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. They call themselves the “Enthusiasm Society”, and describe their meetings as “fermentations”; one of them even “wears a cape”. But “drama pulses under the comedy, too”, and a “cool astringency” grows.

“Late Fame”, adapted from a novella by the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, is “razor-sharp on class and art”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Unearned riches, it tells us, “are mostly for the rich”.

In the end, “it’s Dafoe’s film”. It’s a reminder that he’s often at his best when he’s not at full stretch in “loony mode” (as in “Poor Things” or “The Northman”). “He’s in nearly every frame, quiet and serious, achingly sympathetic. It’s worth watching just for him.”

by Matthew Sweet

Barbara Cartland, like most successful writers, was a creature of routine. Every day, between 1.15pm and 4pm, she would recline on a chaise longue, “clad in brilliant pink, hair a platinum helmet”, and dictate around 7,000 words to a secretary while “fondling a Pekingese”, said Wendy Holden in Literary Review. 

By these means, she churned out roughly 20 novels a year – more than 700 over the course of her lifetime – and sold 750 million copies, a figure “exceeded only by Shakespeare and Agatha Christie”.

While her “tales of virgins and sheikhs, pirates and princesses” were devoured across the world, they proved especially durable in the Middle East: “Arab men,” she noted, “can’t get enough of the sort of girl I write about.”

It would be easy simply to mock Cartland, but the journalist and broadcaster Matthew Sweet avoids this trap in “The Great Dictator”. Without skipping over her faults, he “gives her virtues full credit” and treats her as a figure of “cultural and historical importance”. The result is a “fantastically enjoyable, drily hilarious and incredibly well-researched biography”.

Cartland may have had a “marshmallowy exterior”, but Sweet shows in this “brilliant book” that behind it “lurked sinews of high-tensile steel”, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. 

Coming of age just after the First World War, at a time when there “were not enough husbands to go around”, she resolved to be “financially self-sufficient”.

She spent the 1920s working as a gossip columnist, reporting on the escapades of the Bright Young Things, before making a “tactical marriage to a dull man called Alexander McCorquodale”, who proved to be an alcoholic. Divorcing him after having a daughter, Raine (the future Countess Spencer, stepmother to Diana, Princess of Wales), she “effected a neat swap” by marrying his paternal cousin, which meant she didn’t even need to change her surname. In 1950, the pair settled in Camfield Place, a manor house in Hertfordshire, where she lived until her death in 2000, aged 98.

“Sweet writes with great wit and brio but also considerable sympathy,” said Lynn Barber in The Observer. He points out that Cartland was a “great organiser”. While clothes were rationed during the Second World War, she set up a scheme to lend wedding dresses to Auxiliary Territorial Service brides. Later, she led a campaign to create a reservation for Gypsies near Camfield Place: “Barbaraville” opened in 1963 and “remains to this day”. It is, Sweet suggests, “perhaps her most lasting achievement”.

Influential feminist who co-founded Ms. magazine

A journalist, activist and writer, Gloria Steinem, who has died aged 92, was one of the leaders of feminism’s second wave. Unlike contemporaries such as Germaine Greer, she is not associated with a seminal book, said The Guardian, but she wrote several bestsellers. She coined the term “reproductive freedom”; co-founded organisations to support women in politics and the media; and in 1971 she launched Ms. – the first national magazine owned and run by women. She worked there for 15 years. Tackling topics such as domestic violence and equal pay, while highlighting the sexist assumptions that underpinned American society, Ms. served as the feminist movement’s manifesto, said The New York Times. It offered consolation to countless women – and emboldened them to fight discrimination and harassment in the workplace and at home. “When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,” Steinem said. “It was just called life.”

Steinem had a gift for encapsulating her message in pithy one-liners: “I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career”; “If men could menstruate, they would brag about how long and how much”; “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” Challenging the image of the women’s libber as dateless and humourless, she led a glittering social life, and had relationships with high-profile men, including the film director Mike Nichols and Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen. With her long hair, short skirts and aviator glasses adding to her media appeal, she came to be seen as the face of the feminist movement, said The Times. This irritated other activists (including Betty Friedan, whose book “The Feminine Mystique” had effectively launched the second wave); but it was not, Steinem pointed out, a role she had chosen. She disliked the way the media dwelt on her looks (Newsweek referred to her as “a lifesize counterculture Barbie doll”). Later, she confessed that as well as being terrified of public speaking, she had always been insecure about her appearance, and said that she’d worn dark glasses to hide her “pudding face”.

Gloria Steinem was born in 1934. Her mother worked as a journalist until she had a serious breakdown. Her father, whom Steinem adored, ran a dance hall in Michigan in the summers, and in the winters packed the family into a car and travelled south, selling antiques. When she was 10, her parents split up, and she was left to look after her mother in a rat-infested basement. This traumatic period fed into her later aversion to domesticity. (She’d never marry, she once said, “because I can’t mate in captivity”.)

At 17, she won a place to study government at Smith College. By the early 1960s, she was living in New York, writing for magazines including Cosmopolitan and Esquire. She made her name in 1963 with a piece exposing the misogyny and exploitation faced by Playboy Bunnies: she had worked as one undercover (and was often, thereafter, dismissed by her critics as a “former Bunny”).

Yet she didn’t consider herself a feminist then; the turning point came in 1969, when she attended a “speak-out” in Greenwich Village where women talked about their abortions. She had had one aged 22. In 1970, she gave a commencement speech at Vassar in which she warned the graduating students that “our first problem is not to learn, but to unlearn” that “woman means submission, black means inferior – preconceptions embedded so deeply in our thinking we honestly may not know that they are there”. Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh dubbed her a “feminazi”.

In the 1980s and 1990s, she dismayed some admirers by dating the conservative property tycoon Mort Zuckerman and defending Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In 2000, her critics were jubilant when she married her partner, David Bale (father of the actor Christian). Inevitably, she was appalled by the rise of Donald Trump. In 2022, she was asked what she felt about women’s progress towards equality. “I feel proud,” she said. “And I feel mad as hell we are still dealing with the same old issues.”