The Echo of a Distant Time

Saturday, November 29, 2025

Remembering Natalie Wood, 20 July 1938 to 29 November 1981

“I didn't like children. I didn't think of myself as a child. I didn't like any of the things other children were interested in.” —Natalie Wood, gone from the world on this day in 1981, at only forty-three. She appears here in a radiant promotional still for The Great Race (1965, Warner Bros.), a vision of mid-century glamour caught at its zenith. In this photograph she seems to distil the essence of her screen presence: that miraculous fusion of sparkle and stillness, vivacity tempered by something inward and ineffably sad.

Few stars ever carried such light within such fragility. Her smile illuminates the frame, yet behind it flickers the shadow of introspection, the faint ache that made her beauty so indelible. Not all of her films were winners (see Penelope, as wretched a film as I've ever seen), but in all she was both muse and mystery—a woman whose brightness could fill a cinema, and whose silence could linger long after the film had ended.

A life forever diminished: C.S. Lewis on the ‘new normal’ in the aftermath of grief

A softly lit oil portrait of a woman seated upright against a pale background, her composure poised between resignation and endurance. Her hair, silver and fine, frames a face of quiet intelligence, rendered with exquisite naturalism. She wears a faded blue blouse, the fabric loosely draped and suggestive of long wear, and a cream blanket is drawn about her lower body. Her right leg terminates in a polished wooden prosthesis, its smooth amber tone contrasting the muted palette of her surroundings. The painter’s restrained brushwork evokes the moral seriousness of post-war realism, merging tenderness with stoic clarity. The composition’s stillness, its nearly monochrome harmony of ochres and blues, summons associations of solitude, recovery, and the muted dignity of survival.

image generated via ChatGPT

“Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.”

—C.S. Lewis, born 29 November 1898 in Belfast. Passage from A Grief Observed.

Wednesday, November 26, 2025

Thanksgiving? An open missive to nearly every former ‘real-life’ acquaintance I have endured across forty-eight wretched years

A dimly lit interior rendered in painterly chiaroscuro, evoking solitude and spiritual estrangement. A wooden table stands at the centre, upon it a roast turkey and a small dish of food, the sole illumination coming from a single candle whose wavering flame sends faint smoke curling upward. The walls are papered with ghostly avian silhouettes, their forms like half-seen omens in the flickering gloom. A pale cross of light, projected through an unseen aperture, glows faintly upon the wall, lending the room an uneasy sanctity. Beyond the curtained window, a cold blue night reveals a distant house with warmly lit windows—an image of unreachable fellowship. The setting suggests the aftermath of a forsaken feast: an empty chair, a cold meal, and the sense of a soul caught between reverence and despair. The atmosphere is one of metaphysical stillness, haunted by both faith and abandonment.

image generated via ChatGPT

Am so not in the mood for Thanksgiving. Not when I realise that, throughout my entire life—and especially now—people have scarcely appreciated anything or anyone around them. Over the past ten years it hath become painfully, almost grotesquely apparent just how dreadful some ninety-five to ninety-eight per cent of human beings truly are. Every baleful intuition I ever harboured about humanity—those judgments which, by my mid-thirties (born in 1978, so do the arithmetic and then recall what befell in #Murica, beginning in earnest circa 2016) I had dismissed as childish or wrong-headed—hath been vindicated in full, and indeed surpassed by yet grimmer evidence.

The past five years in particular have confirmed the trajectory beyond doubt, and one must be wilfully blind not to see what is coming. The only certainty now is that matters shall deteriorate further. Much further.

On a personal level, I am so bloody angry that I ever expended time or effort on virtually, more or less, any individual I have ever personally known. About all of them; any exceptions are so exceedingly rare (or dead) that, if they ever read this, they would already know in their guts I am excepting them. And let it be clearly understood that I speak not of those I have known only virtually—for I do not truly or personally know any such people beyond the occasional friendly exchange and the like—but of what we once called ‘real life’; people I have had face-to-face contact with. Nearly forty-eight years upon this benighted and absurd planet, and about all of it squandered on the unworthy.

This anger is not ebbing, and I have tried everything—literally everything—so this is not an invitation for suggestions, consolations, or idle commentary from the peanut gallery. Indeed, comments are shut off. No, this is merely to place on the record, for all my former ‘IRL’ friends and acquaintances, somewhere in the cosmos and before the Almighty, that when the day comes for me to cross into the Beyond—whenever that may be—I shall go as a free man: free of pain, free of you, and free of all memory of you—you wretched and malevolent creatures.

And I shall not trouble myself with forgiving or withholding forgiveness; I vow, in due course, simply to cease recognising. I care not anymore that many of these individuals had their own issues, nor that I, in turn, projected mine upon others. I am striving to forgive myself merely for having dared to survive in this world; I no longer have the time or the will to decipher what anyone else was thinking. For I already know that, in the great majority of cases, they regarded me as a useful dupe for whatever petty or nefarious purpose occupied them at the moment.

Thus I continue striving to forgive myself, for I did, one time too many, give the impression of being precisely that: a useful dupe. The whole bloody world hath only ever instructed me that I must serve as such for others, beginning on day one. Damn this world and the multitudes who hath come and gone, and who have insisted I be their ragdoll.

The pain each of you, those I have been unfortunate to know in my personal face, hath engraved upon me is woven into my very DNA for eternity; but, in eternity, I shall no longer burden myself with the details or the particulars—the current moment is one of detoxing myself of you, and of all of that that ever enslaved me to appeasing you.

Thus, whatever time remains to me upon this earth I am devoting to incantatory prayer to the Almighty: that those who squandered my time, exploited me, and wilfully wounded me be brought to repentance. And, for my part—indeed the heaviest burden of all—I acknowledge that I, the neurodivergent fool so ravenous for human connection for decades, committed nearly every misstep, awkward moment, and ill-judged act as an exercise in pathetic appeasement, an endless cycle of people-pleasing. It sprang from a childhood in which I was incessantly commanded—and by more than a few, and above all by those closest to me—to be a nice, docile, passive boy, or else. I shall be grateful for life only when all of this ends.

You—many of you, at least, though certainly not all—possessed better social skills. Most of you had more energy; I suffer from Chronic Fatigue. Most had more ostensibly ‘likeable’ personalities, even if I myself found any given one of you scarcely tolerable. Above all, the majority of you were simply ‘lucky’, to one degree or another, in your ability either to function or to feign functionality in this cesspit of a world. That is all. None of you were ever any better than me. Ever. And many of you were far more foul, stupid, crass, and uncultured than I have ever been, even at my worst. Yet the fingers have always pointed at me; I suppose I have ever been an easy mark, and I hate myself for allowing that.

My mistake was in trying at all, for every one of you made me feel as though Jesus had hated me from the day I was born—and I am not wholly certain that is not the case; I pray it is not, of course—and I have felt accursed since boyhood. You vultures sensed as much and took advantage. So what sense was there, ever, in attempting to pretend otherwise, or in striving to appease you?

None of this is to suggest that I am ungrateful for the world’s splendours. From the majesty of a symphony to the drama of a Game Seven of the World Series, there remains much worthy of gratitude in the wider picture; for those things in which I could only ever be a spectator to, but never part of. On a deeply personal level, I have felt only unwanted and unneeded by anybody I have ever personally known, and those who made me feel thus were never worth the trouble. Full stop.

Happy Thanksgiving, ingrates.

—Christopher James Swallow of Stoneham, Massachusetts (a/k/a Arthur Newhook); 26 November 2025.

Tuesday, November 25, 2025

Golden glamour, half-hidden in the shadows: Madonna at the height of her fame, appearing like a porcelain doll waiting upon a shelf

A sepia-toned portrait of Madonna, captured in a moment that fuses vulnerability with defiant poise. She crouches low against a plain backdrop, her limbs folded in a manner both sculptural and intimate, the play of light and shadow accentuating the sinew and grace of her form. Her platinum hair, styled in waves that recall 1950s Hollywood glamour, catches the glow, forming a halo-like contrast against her tanned skin. The glimmer of her sequinned bodice and the metallic sheen of her platform heels lend the composition a sense of artifice and performance—hallmarks of her self-fashioned mythology. Her gaze, distant yet resolute, transcends the frame, suggesting reflection amid spectacle, the calm eye within the storm of fame. This 1991 image by Steven Meisel distils her paradox: both icon and ingénue, sacred and profane, poised at the intersection of art, sexuality, and power.

A portrait of Madonna, 1991, seen through Steven Meisel’s mercilessly tender lens: not merely an image but a revelation wrought of contrary humours. For she croucheth low upon herself, limbs drawn inward, arms clasped about her knees as though she might contain the entire din of fame within that slender and delicate vessel. Her regard strayeth aside—beyond our sight, beyond the instant—unto some far horizon discerned of her alone. From this vantage, the rest of us are shut out as from a forbidden mystery.

Sequins shimmer like liquid fire upon her flesh, whilst her hair—sculpted in waves of cinematic perfection—summoneth the spectral glamour of Greta Garbo and Jean Harlow, when womanhood was in equal measure a masque and a defence. Yet Meisel’s genius is in that which he refuseth to disclose: the shadow that looms behind her, immense and heavy, a darkness that threatens to eclipse her hard-won radiance.

Here beholdeth no coquettish idol, nor a creature made for dalliance. It is Madonna as paradox incarnate—the empress of self-fashioning rendered suddenly breakable. The photograph breathes vulnerability into the myth, transforming her into something at once exquisite and human: a porcelain figure poised on the brink of collapse, waiting, perchance, to be taken gently from the glittering shelf of her own renown.

Sunday, November 23, 2025

John Milton’s Areopagitica: a voice of reason from a fractured age, yet also for our present fractured age

A monochrome engraving of the poet John Milton, rendered with solemn clarity and restrained elegance. His visage is long and grave, the expression reflective rather than austere, the eyes set deep beneath a smooth brow, seeming to gaze past the viewer toward some unseen ideal. Loose curls fall symmetrically upon his shoulders, framing a face of spiritual gravity and intellectual refinement. The artist has captured not merely likeness but character—the inward tension of a man divided between faith and reason, rebellion and divine order. His broad lace collar and simple doublet evoke the Puritan sobriety of seventeenth-century England, yet the drawing’s soft gradations of line lend him an almost pre-Raphaelite serenity. It is an image at once human and emblematic: the countenance of the visionary who gave the English tongue its most exalted epic, the poet who sought to ‘justify the ways of God to men’.

public domain

Published on this day in 1644, Areopagitica remains John Milton’s impassioned admonition to heed ‘the voice of reason’, and his powerful denunciation of the English Parliament’s decree (the Licensing Order of 1643) that all authors must first obtain governmental approval before publishing their works. It was composed at the height of the English Civil War, an age of violent ideological fervour and division that was, perhaps, a grim portent of what we now witness unfolding across the globe—most acutely, and relevant to yours truly, within the former United States of America.

It was a fiercely partisan era, yet Areopagitica is the work of a man of nuance and integrity—the very sort of soul who is rare in any epoch, and indispensable in times such as those of seventeenth-century England. Indeed, such men and women are just as vital in our own age of omnipresent technology, nuclear armament, and zealots as unenlightened now as they were in 1644 (or perhaps worse).

Family tradition long held that John Milton was among my ancestors, and though I have found the name ‘Milton’ in my lineage, I have traced it only as far back as the early nineteenth century, in northern Maine and the Maritimes. Doubtless, the line originated somewhere in England—I have confirmed ancestry from virtually every corner of the old country. No matter; I cannot say with certainty that he is a forebear of mine. Yet, I offer humble thanks to the man for what he bestowed upon humanity: ideas that still resonate in certain circles today (amongst the dwindling numbers who still think, that is). I rather suspect he would be appalled at the state of our world today.

Saturday, November 22, 2025

Sculpture quickened into warmth and life: Mariel Hemingway, born on this day in 1962, as she appeared in Playboy, April 1982

A cinematic portrait of actress Mariel Hemingway reclining upon a bed of ivory satin, her body arranged with painterly grace amid folds that shimmer like liquid moonlight. The composition evokes both classical repose and modern vulnerability—her arm drawn protectively across her chest, her expression serene, almost dreamlike. The surrounding textures—silken sheets, lace-trimmed pillows tinged with blush—amplify the interplay of sensuality and innocence, transforming the scene from mere eroticism into an emblem of introspection and aesthetic stillness. The lighting, warm and diffuse, caresses the human form as though it were sculpture rendered in flesh, the entire tableau suffused with a soft, melancholic radiance suggestive of beauty observed in fragile suspension.

Appearing as a painted dream—soft gold light, soft skin, soft linens—light and flesh rendered in the hush of morning: the actress and mental-health advocate Mariel Hemingway in Playboy magazine, April 1982. Born in Mill Valley, California, and the granddaughter of a man she was never destined to know, for he had taken his own life four moons before her birth. That man was none other than one of the 20th century’s most esteemed literary titans, Ernest Hemingway. Here, we see the juxtaposition of ethereal repose with the dark weight of a family mythos, a young woman claiming authorship over her own story.

Thursday, November 20, 2025

Jean Harlow: caught mid-thought between sin and shampoo

A black-and-white photograph of Jean Harlow seated in a bathtub, captured in a moment of startling vulnerability and poise. Her pale hair is piled loosely atop her head, echoing the gleam of the porcelain around her. Turning toward the camera with wide, kohl-rimmed eyes, she embodies the uneasy glamour of pre-Code Hollywood — sensuality rendered with both frankness and restraint. The vertical wood panelling, modest lace curtain, and long-handled brush hanging on the wall suggest a setting of domestic privacy, yet the actress’s direct gaze breaks its intimacy, transforming it into theatre. The chiaroscuro lighting sculpts her shoulders and cheekbones, turning a simple bathing scene into a study in exposure — of body, of fame, and of the fragile boundary between artifice and authenticity.

Apologies, folks, for the lack of posts of late. Am physically unwell and have sunk into a quasi-catatonic state, devoid of will or inclination to do anything—not even to share images of the goddesses, as I so dearly love to do. It is a season of reflection and profound remorse, of revulsion and horror at the state of all things; yet perhaps, too, a season of spiritual purgation. What this world hath wrought upon us all is sickening beyond the reach of words.

Still, here is Jean Harlow, for this is what Lord Arthur does: he strives to preserve beauty, even as he and the world he inhabits have known almost nothing but ugliness. I long to return to this vocation in full once more, though I cannot at present say with any certainty what the coming days and weeks may bring. —Arthur Newhook, 20 November 2025.

Wednesday, November 5, 2025

Elke Sommer and the art of living unapologetically

A black-and-white photograph of a young woman captured in a moment of quiet intensity. She stands before a brick wall and ladder, her gaze steady and faintly defiant as she looks directly into the camera. Her tousled blonde hair frames a face at once soft and self-possessed, the light catching the contours of her cheek and the reflective glint of her eyes. She wears a patterned button-down dress, slightly open at the collar, its fabric suggestive of post-war European chic rendered with unstudied sensuality. In her right hand she holds a bitten apple—an image layered with faint biblical or cinematic suggestion—its simplicity offset by her almost wary poise. The tonal richness of the print captures both the texture of the moment and the nascent aura of celebrity: poised between innocence and allure, between naturalism and performance.

Gerd Kreutschmann, c. 1959

“You don’t have to explain yourself to anyone. It’s your life, live it in whatever way is best for you.” —the German screen goddess, model, and chanteuse Elke Sommer, offering sound advice that the American people—officious, self-righteous, and addicted to moral surveillance whilst in self-inflicted bondage to an orange-stained god-king with the morals of a sewer rat—would be wise to heed. Dignity begins in privacy, and self-determination is the one luxury no civilisation can afford to lose.

Elke Sommer was born on 5 November 1940 in war-darkened Berlin, emerging from the ruins of post-war Europe to embody a new ideal of continental allure that holds up perfectly to this day: blonde, self-possessed, and definitively cosmopolitan. Though she has not been particularly active in public life for decades, she remains an indisputable icon. Of the films in which I have seen her, I must say she was particularly on point as Paul Newman’s cool yet warm, mysterious yet luminous love interest—the spy Inger Lisa Andersson—in 1963’s masterful espionage thriller The Prize. Sensuality and intellect entwined. Alles Gute zum Geburtstag to this esteemed daughter of Deutschland. —Arthur Newhook, 5 November 2025.

Tuesday, November 4, 2025

Will Rogers, born 4 November 1879, and apparently a prophet of sorts

A hand-tinted studio portrait of a middle-aged man with neatly combed brown hair, wearing a dark suit and white shirt with a tie, smiling directly at the viewer. His expression conveys genial confidence, with bright eyes and a mischievous warmth suggesting both wit and approachability. The subtle tinting of his lips and skin gives the photograph an early 20th-century charm, bridging the line between photographic realism and painterly artifice. Inscribed faintly in cursive at the bottom left are the words “Yours, Will Rogers,” identifying the sitter as the beloved American humourist and social commentator. The portrait embodies the genial populism and understated sophistication of its era—an image at once intimate, idealised, and emblematic of a figure who made comedy a form of moral conscience.

Wikimedia Commons

“The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.” One can but conjecture what the great Will Rogers—among the most incisive and quotable of all Americans—might utter were he confronted with Donald Trump and the maelstrom of incivility and wilful ignorance that now characterises the former United States. I strongly surmise that his judgment would be anything but kind. —Arthur Newhook, 4 November 2025.

Sunday, November 2, 2025

The great game lapses into silence, and a long, cold winter awaits

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Ann Rutherford, 2 November 1917 – 11 June 2012

A black-and-white publicity photograph of actress Ann Rutherford, taken circa 1942, capturing the vivacity and poise characteristic of wartime Hollywood glamour. She poses playfully aboard a yacht, one leg bent and lifted, the other extended with pointed toes, her hand braced against the rigging while the other rests lightly atop her head in a gesture of carefree confidence. Her short, puff-sleeved dress, cinched at the waist and trimmed with delicate lace, flares in the breeze, revealing the clean, sculptural lines of her figure against the luminous sweep of the sails behind her. The interplay of sunlight and shadow lends the image a sense of sculptural clarity and motion, its composition evoking both nautical adventure and the exuberant optimism of early-1940s American femininity.

source unknown, but likely an MGM publicity shot

The face of a doll coupled with the legs of Aphrodite herself—so might one aptly describe Ann Rutherford, Vancouver-born yet California-bred, whose luminous presence graced Hollywood’s aureate epoch. She commenced her cinematic career in the saddle, starring in westerns for Republic Pictures alongside such burgeoning luminaries as John Wayne and Gene Autry, before ascending to the illustrious ranks of MGM in 1937. There she achieved enduring fame as Polly Benedict in the Andy Hardy series and as the demure, ill-fated little sister of Scarlett O’Hara in the epic of all epics, Gone with the Wind. Brimming with warmth and ineffable girl-next-door charm, Ann Rutherford was also one of many beloved pin-up icons of the Second World War—an era when the beauty and grace of young women such as she performed a service of no small consequence, sustaining the spirits of those who bore the weight of history’s greatest conflict upon distant battlefields. Indeed, the genre of glamour photography—or ‘cheesecake’ in the vernacular of the time— achieved perhaps its most profound significance during this particular historical juncture, and the lady’s contributions to this morale-fortifying enterprise were nothing short of exemplary. Confectionery for the spirit. —Arthur Newhook, 2 November 2025.

Saturday, November 1, 2025

Dixie Lee, 4 November 1909 – 1 November 1952

Dixie Lee, actress and chanteuse of the early 1930s, stands immortalised in a studio portrait that epitomises the cultivated elegance of nascent Hollywood. She poses with her back turned in gentle contrapposto, her gaze cast over one shoulder—an expression suspended delicately between astonishment and seduction. Her sleeveless satin ensemble glistens beneath the studio lamps, tracing the supple contour of her figure, whilst a soft cap and a single strand of pearls lend a note of refined restraint. The chiaroscuro of light and shadow carves her silhouette with sculptural precision upon the wall behind, conjuring an image at once sophisticated and enigmatic—the very embodiment of Jazz Age glamour distilled into silvered stillness.

Fox Films promotional shot

Born Wilma Winifred Wyatt in the pastoral environs of Harriman, Tennessee, Dixie Lee is remembered—when she is remembered at all—chiefly as the ill-fated first wife of Bing Crosby, and, regrettably, not a particularly felicitous one. Yet before her light was dimmed beneath the vast shadow of his celebrity, she had, in her own right, been a captivating ingénue of early Hollywood. Having won a singing competition, she was promptly signed by Fox Film and, for one brief but incandescent interval at the dawn of the talkies, outshone even her future husband in renown—most notably 1929’s Why Leave Home? in a lead role, and where her charm, poise, and melodic grace marked her as something of a luminary of the shimmering, transitional age.

She first encountered Crosby whilst he was yet an aspiring crooner, and, as was the custom for so many women of her generation, she soon relinquished her own burgeoning career in deference to his. They were wed in 1930, yet the polished veneer of Hollywood domesticity began to fissure almost at once. The marriage was fraught from its inception; scarcely months after their nuptials, in 1931, she resolved to petition for divorce on grounds of ‘mental cruelty’—a grave charge for the time—though the document, in the end, was never formally submitted.

Between 1933 and 1938, four sons were born to the union, yet the household was ever shadowed by turmoil. Dixie’s protracted and ruinous struggle with alcoholism exacted a grievous toll, and tales of discord within the Crosby marriage were a recurrent feature of the gossip columns throughout the 1940s. Less than two years after her final professional appearances—a modest guest turn upon her husband’s radio programme—and at the cruelly premature age of forty-two, Dixie Lee succumbed to ovarian cancer. She departed this world upon this very day, the first of November, 1952, a mere three days shy of what would have been her forty-third birthday. —Arthur Newhook, 1 November 2025.

Friday, October 31, 2025

“When the black cat crosses your path and still you smile, you’re the lucky one.”

Actress and model Lillian Wells kneels amidst a rustic bed of straw in this playful Halloween-themed portrait from the late 1940s. Framed by towering corn stalks, she wears a red-and-white chequered blouse, fastened primly at the collar, and high-waisted black shorts that accentuate her poised silhouette. Upon the painted fence behind her, the shadowed arc of a cat curves with spectral elegance, its silhouette imparting a note of seasonal whimsy, whilst a carved pumpkin grins slyly from the corner of the frame. The controlled interplay of light and composition conjures an atmosphere at once beguiling and faintly suspenseful—transfiguring the studio tableau into a vision of small-town October enchantment.

source unknown

Actress and model Lillian Wells in a Halloween mood, sometime in the 1940s.

Four little witches, no broomsticks required—just charm enough to fly

Four young women, attired in sprightly Halloween finery, recline upon a bed of straw amid carved jack-o’-lanterns and towering sheaves of corn. Each dons a dark blouse or abbreviated frock, crowned by a festive hat—some sharply pointed in witchlike fashion, others wide-brimmed with rustic grace. They lounge in languid confidence, their smiles touched with playful provocation, legs extended towards the lens beneath the gleaming visages of the pumpkins. The monochrome tableau distils the light-hearted glamour of a 1940s studio conceit—an artful mingling of seasonal mischief and beguiling charm.

Paramount publicity shot

Halloween never looked so heavenly with these four Golden Age starlets—namely Barbara Britton, Eva Gabor, Ella Neal, and Katherine (Karin) Booth. Bewitched, bothered, and bewitching—all in a night’s fun, circa 1941. —Arthur Newhook, 31 October 2025.

“The only spell she’s casting is the one that makes you forget your good sense.” Halloween 2025

A glamorous woman of the 1940s reclines for a Halloween-themed photograph, poised within a great wooden tub encircled by glistening apples. Adorned in a pointed witch’s hat and a dark, flowing gown, she tilts her head with coquettish grace as her teeth meet the fruit’s polished skin, her legs elegantly crossed upon the tub’s rim. The monochrome composition fuses autumnal mischief with the opulent allure of Hollywood’s golden age, transmuting the humble sport of apple-bobbing into an image of refined, tantalising sophistication.

source unknown

It hath been many a year since All Hallows’ Eve hath borne any true significance for me; yet here’s to those still young in spirit, who this night shall make merry beneath the flicker of candle and the whisper of autumn’s breath. —Arthur Newhook, 31 October 2025.

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

A smile from a century ago, still bold enough to make the present blush

A young woman of the 1920s reclines upon a wooden swing, one slender leg lifted in a gesture of playful poise, the other extended just enough for her heeled shoe to graze the earth’s surface. She is attired in a loosely draped cardigan worn over a delicate frock or slip, her stockings meticulously rolled to the calf in the manner of the age, and a close-fitting cloche hat nestles over softly marcelled waves of hair. Her lips—darkened to that enigmatic cupid’s bow so favoured by the era’s ingénues—curve into the faintest, most knowing of smiles as her gaze inclines dreamily upward. Bathed in warm sepia hues, the faintly blurred garden beyond imparts an atmosphere at once wistful and beguiling—part coquette’s reverie, part modernist awakening—an image suspended between innocence and sophistication, and perfectly emblematic of a decade learning, with exquisite audacity, how to be modern.

photo: source unknown

Gliding into the modern age with an impossible smile—the kind that might make a bishop forget his sermon and a cynic believe, just for a moment, in beauty. A creature of the 1920s, she wears her rebellion not as armour, but as perfume: her stockings are rolled precisely to the knee, her cloche hat tipped in studied disregard for propriety. In her, one finds the distilled essence of the decade’s greatest contradiction: decorum utterly subverted by delight.

And though the decades may change, though hemlines shift and moral sermons rise only to inevitably fade, her spirit remains imperishably modern: Audacity conducted with grace; her true art is the ability to charm whilst defying, to smile whilst quietly dismantling the rules. —Arthur Newhook, 29 October 2025. {photo: source unknown}

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

Actress Constance Dowling, 24 July 1920 – 28 October 1969

Actress Constance Dowling reclines on a velvet chaise longue trimmed with gold fringe, her pose poised between languor and contemplation. Clad in a cream skirt patterned with oversized bows and a fitted dark top that accentuates her classical silhouette, she radiates an air of weary elegance—beauty not as ornament, but as quiet endurance. One arm supports her head, her expression thoughtful, almost remote, while her long legs, gracefully extended, lend the composition a sculptural equilibrium. The subdued palette—muted ochres, soft crimsons, and pale ivory—infuses the image with a painterly intimacy, as though caught between glamour and introspection. Dowling appears as a figure suspended in time: a relic of mid-century melancholy, embodying both the poise of Hollywood’s golden age and the private ache that often shadowed it.

source unknown

Constance Dowling (née Smith), a native of New York City whose life was indelibly shaped by the opposing forces of beauty and sorrow, departed this ungrateful world on this day in 1969, her existence curtailed prematurely at the age of forty-nine by catastrophic cardiac failure. Statuesque, preternaturally luminous, and possessed of an almost Roman composure, she epitomised a rare archetype: a woman whose sensibilities were anachronistically modern—a paradoxical synthesis of bohemian intellect and cinematic glamour. She moved through the gravitational field of 1940s Hollywood with a singular blend of languid insouciance and restrained defiance.

Her ingress into the cinematic realm occurred beneath the aegis of Samuel Goldwyn, debuting in Up in Arms (1944) alongside Danny Kaye, Dinah Shore, and Dana Andrews. Yet it was the crucible of post-war Italy that would ultimately define her—a brief but incandescent dominion between 1947 and 1950, when the moral and material detritus of Fascism engendered a cinema of unvarnished realism and startling sensuality. Within this milieu she found not only artistic emancipation but also a deeply personal liberation, as though the ruins of Europe offered her a canvas vast enough to accommodate the contradictions of her nature.

Her biography, however, is interwoven with shadowed threads: a conspicuous liaison with the formidable director Elia Kazan, and a tempestuous, ultimately ruinous entanglement with the tormented poet Cesare Pavese. Apocryphal accounts maintain that Pavese’s suicide was, at least in part, precipitated by her rejection—a supposition both melodramatic and, perhaps, not wholly unfounded. (Truth, as ever, resists the neatness of gossip, and no aspersion is cast here).

In 1955 she withdrew from the screen following her marriage to the Hungarian-born producer and director Ivan Tors, a man of visionary temperament whose interests spanned science and metaphysics, and who had produced her final picture, Gog (1954). Their union was marked by an almost utopian idealism: they adopted children from Kenya and surrounded themselves with a circle of avant-garde scientists and mystics. Indeed, it has been posited that Constance herself facilitated the neuroscientist John C. Lilly’s first encounter with the psychotropic revelations of LSD in 1964. Verily, a curiously esoteric trajectory for a mid-century Hollywood starlet.

Hers was a transient constellation within the cultural firmament, yet one that blazed with perilous vitality—a tripartite existence poised between intellect, sensuality, and sorrow in equal measure. Constance Dowling remains an enigmatic presence who traversed the borders of Hollywood and Rome, glamour and grief, leaving behind the indelible impression of a spirit whose brilliance was, perhaps, too intense to be sustained. —Arthur Newhook, 28 October 2025.

Sunday, October 26, 2025

Jacyln Smith: sunshine and satin. #BOTD 1945

Jaclyn Smith, photographed in the 1970s, sits poised outdoors among rows of sunlit chairs. She wears a white halter-style bikini top with a teardrop cut-out at the centre and a sheer cover-up that drapes lightly from her shoulders. Her chestnut hair, voluminous and softly waved, frames a face serene yet luminous, her blue eyes meeting the camera with quiet composure. The afternoon light lends her skin a warm radiance, turning the moment into an emblem of effortless 1970s elegance—part California sunshine, part timeless grace.

source unknown

Texan beauty Jaclyn Smith, circa 1976, looking every inch a lady born of grace, not of struggle. Possessing the classic beauty of a bygone era; had she come along in the 1930s or 1940s, she might have been a leading lady to Hollywood’s leading men. Cary Grant, or Spencer Tracy, prechance. Instead, she was destined to be a rare touch of class, elegance, and poise in the 1970s and 1980s and in trashy television programmes and B-movies typical of that tawdry era.

Born 26 October 1945 in Houston, we can only hope that life is treating her splendidly on her landmark day. —Arthur Newhook, 26 October 2025.

Saturday, October 25, 2025

Marilyn Monroe: remembrance over the din of decay

Marilyn Monroe, circa 1962, lies nestled among white sheets in soft natural light. Her blonde hair spills across the pillow, partly veiling one eye as she smiles faintly toward the camera. The scene feels intimate and serene, her expression radiant yet touched with melancholy. The pale tones of the bedding and background lend the image a sense of purity and calm, as though she has been captured in a moment between waking and dreaming.

At least until such time as Facebook again elects to harass me over absolutely NOTHING, both the Echo of a Distant Time page and the Broken Dolls and Fallen Angels group are returning to full operation—an utterly thankless enterprise on my part, yet one I persist in with no small measure of affection.

What better way to mark this return than with the goddess herself—Marilyn, from 1962—smiling for the camera so that no one might glimpse the ache beneath. Only a short while after this photo session with photographer Bert Stern, she departed an ungrateful world that had used and discarded her in equal measure. To this day, she is worshipped and desecrated in the same breath—her likeness endlessly commodified, her memory endlessly mutilated.

Sometimes I think that perhaps I, too, am complicit in that desecration, merely by being one among millions who places so flawed and fragile a woman upon a pedestal. Given her physical beauty, it is only natural that we indulge in her visage; yet my motives are pure. I have always found myself drawn to those rare and remarkable souls who gave everything to a world unworthy of them—and who, in return, received neither gratitude nor grace. I do not speak of money—though that, too, was often denied, stolen, or squandered—but of respect, of simple human decency: commodities increasingly rare in this late and languishing civilisation of ours.

Still, for those luminous spirits now gone—those who dared to burn brighter than the rest, to carve beauty out of indifference—we may yet offer thanks and draw inspiration from… if only we find the will to choose gratitude over apathy, and remembrance over the din of decay. —Arthur Newhook, 25 October 2025.

Monday, October 20, 2025

“Sometimes I think if I had the same body and the same natural ability and someone else's brain, who knows how good a player I might have been.”

A 1952 Topps baseball card featuring the young Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees, rendered in vivid lithographic colour. Mantle, bat poised upon his shoulder, gazes upward with the unguarded confidence of early promise—a portrait of athletic idealism at the dawn of America’s postwar age. The composition, clean and iconic, captures the sculptural geometry of baseball heroism: cap and uniform crisply defined against a cloudless sky of dreamlike blue. The Yankees’ emblem appears in the lower corner, flanked by Mantle’s printed and facsimile signatures, a subtle interplay between the mechanical and the personal. To later generations, this image would become not merely a collector’s relic but a totem of lost innocence—symbolising both the apotheosis and commodification of mid-century Americana.

Topps c. 1952

One of the rare few who stood among the elite of the elite—brilliant, flawed, immortal: Mickey Mantle, born 20 October 1931 in Oklahoma.

“A goddess sculpted in scandal”: Pauline Bonaparte, born 20 October 1780

An exquisite neoclassical portrait of Pauline Bonaparte, painted circa 1806 by Robert Lefèvre, Napoleon’s favoured court artist. The sitter reclines gracefully upon a green velvet couch, her posture at once languid and deliberate, conveying the self-assurance of a woman accustomed to command attention. Draped in a white empire-line gown of sheer muslin, fastened with a gilt sash that glimmers across her waist, she radiates a delicate sensuality softened by poise. Her head is crowned with a jewelled diadem and a gauze veil, the ensemble evoking both Roman antiquity and early nineteenth-century Parisian elegance. Pauline’s gaze, directed slightly away from the viewer, carries an air of introspective detachment—suggesting both intelligence and ennui, a woman aware of her myth and resigned to it. Lefèvre’s brushwork, of impeccable polish, renders every texture—skin, silk, and gem—with a restraint that exalts her beauty without descending into sentimentality.

Illustration: Robert Lefèvre, c. 1806

“I do not believe that any man in the world is more unfortunate in his family than I am.”—attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.

Born upon this day in 1780 was Pauline Bonaparte—Napoleon’s younger sister and, by the common testimony of her age, the most resplendently ungovernable spirit of that singular house. Beauty and scandal clung to her as fragrance to the rose; she was at once enchantress and provocation—adored and exasperating in the same breath.

From girlhood she displayed an audacity rare even amidst the licentious airs of post-revolutionary France: quick of wit, irreverent in laughter, her appetites untamed by convention or consequence. Marriage to General Leclerc did little to school her passions; widowhood, yet less. When she later became Princess Borghese, it was less an elevation than an improvisation—a courtesan’s art reborn beneath the veil of nobility.

In Rome she became as a living fable. Her snow-white steeds were shod with silver; her raiment so diaphanous that even the world-wearied salons of the Eternal City blushed for shame. Painters adored her; prelates despaired; and ambassadors, once masters of intrigue, found their composure scattered before her smile.

At last, rumour’s tide did reach Paris. Napoleon, ever the jealous sentinel of family decorum, addressed to her a missive befitting a patriarch grown weary—a letter of admonition couched in the language of exile and restraint. She obeyed in semblance, for a season; in spirit, never. No imperial edict could subdue a nature so gloriously insubordinate.

In Pauline the contradictions of the Bonapartes found their most glittering consummation—grace entwined with folly, splendour interlaced with ruin. She was, as one astonished contemporary styled her, ‘a goddess sculpted in scandal’. And perchance, in the vast theatre of human history, she grasped the meaning of fame with an instinct swifter and truer than that of her conquering brother himself. —Arthur Newhook, 20 October 2025.

Thursday, October 16, 2025

Remembering Ace Frehley: 27 April 1951 – 16 October 2025

A striking vision of retro-futurist glamour rendered with painterly precision. A woman with pale blonde hair cascading to her shoulders stands against a deep cosmic backdrop flecked with stars and a faintly glowing red planet. Her face is painted in theatrical blue-black makeup forming winged lightning-bolt motifs around her eyes—an echo of 1970s glam rock iconography—contrasted by her calm, intelligent gaze and crimson lips. She wears a form-fitting silver jumpsuit with sculpted shoulders, its metallic sheen mirroring the night sky’s luminosity, lending her the air of a celestial envoy or interstellar performer. Her poise—one hand on hip, the other resting lightly by her side—balances defiance and serenity, as if she were both muse and messenger of some cosmic art form. The image fuses rock mythology, science-fiction reverie, and portraiture into a single, vividly imagined emblem of beauty transcending both time and gravity.

image generated by ChatGPT

{AP 16 October} ‘Ace Frehley, Kiss’ original lead guitarist and founding member, dies at 74’

Rest in peace, Starman. At this point in my life, I would almost sooner endure Chinese water torture than listen to KISS and their hair-band ilk. Once upon a time—when youth dulled discernment—I lapped up that racket with the same appetite I brought to fast food and the ceaseless blare of televised idiocy. But age, misophonia, and the daily parade of performative imbecility—from the corridors of power down to the trailer park—have conspired to render me a broken-down, jaded 47-year-old, sick to death of all the noise that passes for culture.

Still, fairness demands its due: Ace Frehley was perchance the most competent musician in that crew during the ’70s, and ‘New York Groove’ is better than reason or lineage might allow; a melody whose vulgar birth cannot efface its strange vitality, and superior by a good margin to the rest of the KISS catalogue. The manner of his death—a fall last month leading to a brain bleed—is unsettling, particularly for those of us with parents north of seventy and maybe not always steady on their feet. Life is perilously fragile.

Fragility is the only constant. Godspeed. —Arthur Newhook, 16 October 2025.

Wednesday, October 15, 2025

Pretty in pink, velvet and silence her two most loyal companions: the enigmatic Jean Peters, 15 October 1926 – 13 October 2000

20th Century Fox publicity shot, c. 1950. Via Getty Images

Amidst the gilded constellation of 20th Century Fox in the late 1940s and throughout the following decade, Jean Peters held a curious sovereignty—half siren, half mystery. Her renown was fashioned in the portrayal of women whose merest glance might unmake the soul of man: flint beneath velvet, desire alloyed with peril. With a smouldering intensity on screen, she could convincingly embody that species of femme fatale, wherein beauty and destruction are but two syllables of the same breath.

Yet, away from the klieg lights, the actress was consistently described as soft of speech and tender of spirit—a creature whose private nature stood in clear contrariety to the wanton heroines she was bidden to enact. Mistress Peters did inwardly resist the very sexpot image the studio so assiduously cultivated, a quiet rebellion against her own commodification.

This nuanced tension, however, is wholly effaced by the photograph in question, circa 1950, wherein no hint of inward strife may be discerned. Instead, a vision of post-war splendour, wherein all private battle is transfigured into serenity beneath the alchemy of perfect light. —Arthur Newhook, 15 October 2025.

Tuesday, October 14, 2025

Lost in a sea of ice, a fragile sparrow in a blizzard of sorrow. The ultimate portrait of the tragic silent heroine, Lillian Gish. Born 14 October 1893 – 27 February 1993.

Lillian Gish drifts ghostlike across a frozen river, her dark gown stark against the blinding expanse of snow and ice. The year is 1920, Way Down East, and cinema itself seems to shiver with her. Every fold of fabric, every tremor in her posture conveys both fragility and moral endurance—the essence of silent-era storytelling distilled into a single image. Her expression, wide-eyed with terror and transcendence, catches the thin light of winter, as though grace itself had taken human form and wandered, lost, into a storm. Around her, the frozen world becomes both stage and crucible: nature as adversary, faith as her only warmth.

United Artists

“I've never been in style, so I can't go out of style.” —Lillian Gish. Seen here as the very embodiment of fragile defiance amid a frozen desolation, her anguish etched against eternity in the shattering finale of Way Down East (1920). The queen of silent sorrow, her face could summon tears where words dared not tread—a creature of such purity and pathos that she seemed less mortal than mythic, the cinema’s first true saint of suffering. —Arthur Newhook, 14 October 2025.

Monday, October 13, 2025

The enduring charm of Laraine Day, 13 October 1920 – 10 November 2007

Laraine Day stands in sunlight by the shore, the very picture of 1940s poise softened by seaside ease. Her floral swimsuit, modest yet flattering, gathers the brightness of the day around her like a halo. Bare feet press into sand still cool from morning tide, and the surfboard beside her becomes both prop and partner—symbol of youthful daring, the kind once immortalised by Hollywood’s golden lens. Her smile is unguarded yet perfectly framed, an expression of open joy caught midway between glamour and sincerity, as though the camera itself were a dear friend rather than an instrument of fame.

photo by Oliver Sigurdson, c. 1945

“Let someone else be the world's greatest actress. I'll be the world's greatest baseball fan.” —a pretty good actress, at least, Laraine Day, born 13 October 1920. Known to millions as the sweetheart of the screen, she won hearts as Nurse Mary Lamont in the beloved Dr Kildare films—her performance a study in luminous poise and wholesome sincerity. Yet to dismiss her as merely the ingénue next door would be to miss the steel within the silk: at only nineteen, she shone under the tutelage of director Alfred Hitchcock, and starring opposite the formidable Joel McCrea, in the excellent Foreign Correspondent (1940, United Artists), acquitting herself with grace and intelligence far beyond her years.

Off-screen, her story was scarcely less vivid. For more than a decade—from 1948 to 1960—she was celebrated as ‘the First Lady of Baseball’, as the wife of the fiery, mercurial manager Leo Durocher, whose temper and genius for the game were legendary. To that end, she hosted a pre-game broadcast for the New York Giants on WMGM 1050 AM (a modern-day ESPN radio affiliate with the call letters WEPN).

A divine and dependable leading lady in every sense, Laraine Day embodied the rare union of warmth and discipline, the professional polish of the studio era tempered by a very human charm. Whether clad in a nurse’s uniform or a designer gown, she embodied the confidence of a woman who knew precisely who she was, and how to remain so in an industry that seldom forgave identity. —Arthur Newhook, 13 October 2025.

“I never meant to fall, darling—but isn’t it delicious when the world catches you softly?” Remembering Barbara Kent, the Canadian-born starlet of Hollywood’s Golden Age, who departed this day in 2011

Barbara Kent tumbles into a snowdrift with a mix of grace and comic surprise, her snowshoes flaring outward like delicate wings caught mid-flutter. The flapper-era knit cap and short skirt evoke a time when youthful daring met new freedom—an age of laughter, lipstick, and cinematic innocence. Even as she slips, there’s poise in her motion: the unstudied art of a silent-film ingénue turning a fall into choreography. Around her, the snow gleams like powdered silver, the whole scene alive with mischief and charm.

Getty Images

Barbara Kent—brought forth amid the snowbound vastness of Alberta on 16 December 1907, and finally granted merciful freedom from this mortal coil on 13 October 2011, having attained the prodigious age of 103—was among the final embers of the first, incandescent epoch of Hollywood, an icon of an era when beauty seemed to respire rather than merely posture.

Having moved California at some point in childhood, Barbara Kent commenced her professional life, aged 17, by being anointed Miss Hollywood of 1925—the very quintessence of her generation’s ideal: soft of voice yet lambent of presence, her allure founded not upon contrivance but upon an exquisite equipoise—an innocence quickened by intelligence, a modesty irradiated by quiet certainty. The diadem secured her passage to the studios, where her cultivated stillness proved eloquent in a medium that conversed through silence alone.

Her big break arrived almost immediately. In Flesh and the Devil (1926), she was cast opposite Greta Garbo and John Gilbert—colossi of the silver screen—yet she did not vanish beneath their conflagration. Her performance served as counterpoint: tender, irreducibly human, the necessary cantus firmus beneath Garbo’s grand operatic blaze.

Over the next five or so years, she graced numerous productions—perhaps most memorably as the benignant Rose Maylie in the 1933 adaptation of Oliver Twist—negotiating the advent of the talkies with unblemished poise (a feat not universally achieved by many of contemporaries). She adapted, endured, and then, with characteristic reticence, withdrew almost entirely from acting following her marriage to the talent agent Harry Edington in late 1932.

To recall Barbara Kent—or those kindred souls who shared her brief effulgence—is to glimpse once more the dawn of cinema itself, when the alchemy of light and motion still shimmered with the shock of creation, and a young woman from the boundless Canadian prairies might step into that radiance and, for one breath of eternity, shine as bright as the sun. —Arthur Newhook, 13 October 2025.

Saturday, October 11, 2025

Bette Davis: satin, suggestion, and a single exposed truth

Bette Davis reclines against a striped sofa, poised between languor and challenge. The photograph, from around 1938, captures her in sculptural chiaroscuro—hair a cascade of marcelled curls, eyes half-lidded but alert, lips precise as punctuation. She wears a fitted white knit bodice with delicate straps and twisted cord detail, its simplicity countered by the bold opulence of her jewellery: a pendant of dark stones ringed in light, twin cuffs studded to match, a ring glinting like a withheld remark. The composition balances warmth and hauteur—one arm draped over the cushion, the other resting lightly near her lap—suggesting both repose and readiness. The lighting isolates her against a field of shadow, drawing the gaze to her shoulders and throat, where elegance becomes eroticism. She embodies her own credo: that the merest glimpse of satin or skin carries more charge than overt display.

“I often think that a slightly exposed shoulder emerging from a long satin nightgown packs more sex than two naked bodies in bed.” —Bette Davis, rather proving the point in this image, circa 1938 via the Everett Collection.

“A mirror keeps my secrets safer than any friend ever could. Before the jazz begins, I give myself a moment of grace — just one breath, one look, one quiet little dream that belongs only to me.”

A 1920s dressing-room tableau: a young woman, adult and assured, braces one foot upon a low bench while fastening her stocking. Her cloche hat—a dark bell with a pale ribbon—shadows waved bobbed hair. A fox-fur stole pours over one shoulder, its softness echoing the brushed nap of her short, dark dress. The lifted hem reveals the clean curve of hip and stocking-top; in the cheval mirror, her backside becomes a second, ghostly subject, framed by carved acanthus and pearls of gesso. Plaited Mary-Jane heels, a tasselled reticule in hand, and a scatter of studio paintings behind her place the scene between boudoir and atelier. The light is high and even—silver rather than sultry—so the mood reads intimate without tipping into salacious. Lines and ovals rhyme throughout: hat brim, mirror ellipse, rounded thigh, bowed bench legs—Art Deco geometry softened by fur and flesh.

source unknown

The 1920s stitched in fabric and rhythm: silk that murmurs of emancipation, stockings that stride to the tempo of the city. Fur whispers of luxury, tassels laugh at restraint. Listen closely—one can almost hear Ravel spinning on the gramophone, and the delicate click of a clasp completing the ritual A century on, the wisdom still glimmers: elegance is not the costume, but the restraint—reveal a breath, conceal a stanza, and let the mirror hum the melody.

A woman who could outshine artifice with a single, unguarded smile: Diane Keaton, photographed by Norman Seeff, c. 1975

A monochrome portrait of actress Diane Keaton, radiating unaffected poise and understated confidence. She poses with her arms raised, hands resting lightly behind her head, allowing her straight, shoulder-length hair to fall freely about her face. The composition is spare and unadorned, yet profoundly intimate—capturing the spontaneous warmth of a woman who has never needed artifice to command attention. Her faint, knowing smile and calm gaze convey a blend of wit and serenity, while the soft interplay of light and shadow accentuates the natural contours of her face and arms. Clad in a simple black tank top, Keaton embodies a timeless minimalism—her beauty emerging not from glamour but from authenticity, the camera recording a moment of quiet self-assurance and self-possession that would later define her screen persona.

“I build a wall around myself. I'm hard to get to know. Any trait you have, it gets worse as you go along.” —Diane Keaton, 1946–2025. She made honesty fashionable. We could use more of that in the world as it is now. She made honesty fashionable—and how rare that seems now. In a world stitched together with pretence, we could use a little more of her kind of truth. —Arthur Newhook, 11 October 2025.