Brigitte Bardot, 1934 – 2025.

The ultimate French screen goddess hath departed this unworthy realm. Thank you, chère dame, for a life and body of work that ennobled it. Dazzling, divisive, indelible: she taught the camera to breathe, and then elected silence. Brigitte Bardot, 1934–2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Pictures of You

image generated via ChatGPT

One of the members of The Cure, the Hall of Fame English goth rock band, has died, aged 65. A group whose music has never once felt congenial to my ears, not even now, but it once mattered profoundly to someone: a woman I last saw close to twenty-five years ago, scarcely remembered for most of that span, and yet whose presence has haunted my consciousness for the past three months with inexplicable insistence.

We worked together in the back room of a long-defunct—and thoroughly deserving-to-be-defunct—retail establishment. She kept The Cure and Morrissey in perpetual rotation, to the slow erosion of my patience; but by then I was keenly aware that life had inflicted crueller torments upon me, so I endured. Without divulging any details about who she was in this realm, for that is not my purpose and is absolutely nobody’s business (nobody I speak to would recognise the name, anyhow), I will say this: it has been impressed upon my psyche—a forceful relevation—that this girl deserved far better from the world, and infinitely better from me.

In those years, I was a ruin masquerading as a young man: erratic, damaged, inattentive to the good that stood before me. An absolute menace that broke everything I came into contact with. I never once considered courting this girl, in spite of her beauty, and never earnestly attempted to show myself to her in a favourable light; I treated her, at best, like an exasperating younger sister, and often less kindly than that. We did frequently annoy one another. Meanwhile, for the bulk of that time, I squandered myself on a grotesque and destructive relationship with a corpulent she-devil that ended up costing me for years after the fact. I lived a life so deranged that, compared with the late ’90s and early ’00s, my present eccentricities may be the picture of stability. And still, I have come to know only very recently that this lady I speak of cared for me far more than she let on. Loved me, in fact, very much in spite of myself, for reasons that only grace could fathom. A spirit, a whisper from beyond reason, and a voice of supreme authority who tells me this repeatedly now, and with such clarity that retrospection rearranges itself into a painful new coherence. (For the record, and if not already apparent, this individual is deceased).

Thus I find myself contemplating the sheer profundity of my own folly. I was wholly unworthy as a suitor—perhaps it is even a mercy that I never presumed to try in those years—yet she, had I not been so catastrophically blind, would have been the one and only soul capable of drawing a better man from the wreckage. She rather wished to; she tried in her small, tentative ways, gestures I now perceive with painful hindsight, though at the time I was too mired in my own brokenness to recognise them for what they were.

Call me mad, delusional, schizophrenic—whatever appellation satisfies your taxonomy of human frailty. There may even be a hint to those charges, but I no longer care. I record these thoughts not for public absolution but for the quiet reckoning of my own spirit. I made every wrong decision imaginable more than a quarter of a century ago and have paid dearly for them, in ways both overt and subterranean. And yet, despite all logic, despite the absence of any physical presence, despite over two decades of nearly forgetting—she has permeated my consciousness with an insistence that defies reason. She reveals, with a strange and sorrowful clarity, the truths I was too stubborn or too wounded to grasp.

And so I do not resist it. I cannot. In an inexplicable yet unmistakable way, it is a final chance to understand what I once squandered, and what it might yet mean for whatever remains of my life.

Spirits are real, and they do strive to communicate with us; it is simply that most of us lack the eyes to see or the ears to discern, and for the longest time I was unquestionably among that number. Yet a measure of mercy hath at last been granted me; may deliverance and redemption, in their appointed hour, follow thereafter. —Arthur Newhook, 28 December 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Strip both names from it, for neither merits the honour: a reflection upon the ‘Trump–Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’

Cecil Stoughton/Lelands Auction

{WP 19 December} ‘Kennedy Center adds Trump’s name to building, despite legal concerns’

The Trump–Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts: I confess I indulged in no small measure of sentimental reverence for the Kennedy dynasty over many years, but it is time—well past time, in truth—for such nostalgia to be laid to rest. Howsoever towering John F. Kennedy may appear when set beside the present holder of the office—and I do freely acknowledge his true heroism in war—we must at last reckon with the full measure of the man: he was corrupt; his fumbling hand brought the United States perilously close to the brink of a third world war (albeit he was not the architect of that crisis); and he behaved appallingly toward Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, toward Marilyn Monroe, and toward Heaven knoweth how many other women.

The dynasty’s moral deficiencies did not begin nor end with him. Joseph Kennedy, the family patriarch, held an admiration for Hitler. Ted Kennedy, lionised by many, bore responsibility for a woman’s death. And today we behold Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dragging American public health discourse back unto the intellectual standard of the colonial age—an erstwhile advanced medical system now obliged to genuflect before a man whose understanding is, at best, mediæval.

For generations there hath existed an almost tribal fealty toward the Kennedys within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, most especially among the predominantly Irish Catholic working class. Yet these have never been my people. As a nominal Protestant of largely English and German descent, I understood from childhood—keenly and unforgettably—that I did not belong, nor was I welcome, within my overwhelmingly Catholic community situated scarcely ten miles north of Boston. (Think somewhere in the vicinity of Spot Pond). It was no phantom of my imagination; I was told so in the plainest, most wounding terms on countless occasions—most vehemently by the Irish kids, and, to a lesser but still palpable degree, by the Italian ones. Why, then, have I spent so many years idealising the Kennedys, a clan whose mythology I was never invited to share? Only Jacqueline ever embodied genuine grace or dignity.

So let us say it plainly: enough of the Kennedys, and curse the cult built around them. And as for Trump—his name, and that of his brood, deserveth no sanctified place in the public square. Strip both names from the façade. We are not the Soviet Union, and no civilised republic ought to plaster the monuments of its cultural life with the surnames of dubious dynasties.

—Arthur Newhook (pen name), somewhere in the vicinity of the Middlesex Fells and severely pissed-off, 19 December 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Rest in Peace, Rob and Michelle Reiner

Getty Images

{Sky News 14 December} “US director and actor Rob Reiner and wife found dead 'with stab wounds' at his LA home”

Rest in peace, Rob and Michelle Reiner. I can scarcely summon the words—there is simply too much tragedy pressing in from every side—yet it is plain we have lost a great actor, a great director, and a great American. Rob Reiner was an indispensable presence in the single most significant and culturally consequential television sitcom ever produced, and then, with remarkable ease, he transformed himself into a filmmaker of true distinction. It was he who gave This Is Spinal Tap to the world—the ne plus ultra of satire and parody, a work so definitive it has never truly been surpassed (no, I have yet to see the new sequel, but shall make a point of it in the coming days).

Of Michelle Reiner I know less offhand, yet the fact that such fundamentally decent, talented people—individuals who contributed so much good to our troubled world—should meet their end in so harrowing a manner only deepens my sense of doom, my conviction that humanity is stumbling towards a darkness of its own making.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Light, shadow, and a woman who knew exactly how to command both: Joan Bennett

Columbia Pictures, 1942

#OTD 1990: Joan Bennett, the distinguished and profoundly adaptable actress, took her final bow at the age of eighty. Born into one of America’s grand theatrical dynasties—her grandmother, parents, and illustrious sisters Constance and Barbara all creatures of the stage and screen—Bennett was seemingly fated for performance. Yet she transcended inheritance, transforming what might have been mere legacy into art fashioned boldly of her own hand.

Over a career that spanned more than sixty years, she became a very mistress of metamorphosis. First the golden ingénue of the early talkies, then—under the darkling, chiaroscuro eye of Fritz Lang—the smouldering brunette heroine of Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window, before emerging, in her later years, as a commanding matriarch of theatre, cinema, and television alike.

Few actresses navigated Hollywood’s shifting eras with such poise or intelligence. Joan Bennett remains not merely the descendant of a storied lineage, but its apotheosis: a woman who reinvented herself across the decades with elegance, courage, and a rare, enduring luminosity.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Stretched out as a figure from a Renaissance sketch, a mood of memory rather than shock: Sharon Stone in Playboy, July 1990

Sharon Stone, in Playboy, July 1990—doth bear the languid grace of a figure rescued from a Florentine sketchbook, more muse than siren. The pose recalls not the vaunting gestures of provocation but the serenity of Renaissance study, wherein form setteth itself in measured balance against the shadow, and the body is made a kind of meditation.

Her expression—neither wantonly coy nor stiffly defiant—appears to be caught betwixt thought and dreaming, belonging less unto the realm of the sensual than unto that of memory and inward musing. An archetype of governed fragility: present and yet unknowable, mortal and yet refined to an ideal. A beauty that crieth not aloud, but breatheth gently, like a whispered truth.

Truly, Sharon Stone was among the fairest and most admired women upon the earth at the hour of this shoot, and rose thereafter to become one of Hollywood’s highest-grossing and most gifted actresses in the prime of her days. Of what present course she steereth now I know not, yet I doubt not she remains a bold and dauntless spirit still.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Frank Zappa, who departed this realm on 4 December 1993 and may be currently rolling over continually in his grave, on ‘Death by Nostalgia’

image generated via Google Gemini

Four decades on, nostalgia is just about all we have left. 

"The really big news of the eighties is the stampede to regurgitate mildly camouflaged musical styles of previous decades, in ever-shrinking cycles of 'nostalgia.

"(It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice—there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. When you compute the length of time between The Event and The Nostalgia For The Event, the span seems to be about a year less in each cycle. Eventually within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia.)” 

—from the 1989 memoir, The Real Frank Zappa Book.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Muratura Viva: the quiet suffocation and pious prison of Sister Virginia Maria, the ‘Nun of Monza’

Anne Heywood in The Lady of Monza, 1969.

4 December 1575 — Milan gave birth to one of the most haunting figures of its age: Marianna de Leyva y Marino, whom the chronicles shall later name the Nun of Monza. Her life reads less as a tale of mortal days than as gothic tragedy. Her mother gone before memory could form, her father—aloof, imperious, and full of worldly designs—consigned her at thirteen unto the convent: that most devout of prisons. In sixteenth-century Christendom it was a fate laid upon daughters with grievous frequency, though veiled in sanctimony; the Church styled it devotion, the fathers called it prudence, and the maidens themselves suffered no voice at all. It is a grim practice that remains, alas, persistently alive in certain corners of the globe and within that institution to this very day.

As Sister Virginia Maria, she endured the quiet suffocation of cloistered life until, around twenty-one, desire—or coercion—broke through the walls. Her seducer, the nobleman Giovanni Paolo Osio, already tainted by blood and infamy, drew her into a commerce of the flesh that shocked even the jaded chambers of Lombardy. From their furtive union sprang a child, living witness of the transgression. When discovery loomed, Osio’s response was murder; a fellow sister who dared speak was silenced forever. The crimson deed did eventually seal their destinies: Osio fled justice, but Sister Virginia had no such escape.

The Church tried her, condemned her, and sentenced her to muratura viva—to be literally walled alive. No mere imprisonment, it was a ritualised living death: a stone cell scarcely larger than a coffin, air eked through a narrow grate, and silence unbroken save for the scrape of victuals slid through a hatch. Rations were meagre: sufficient to sustain the body, but never to comfort it. Days, seasons, and years bled into one another in the half-dark, until even the sense of self began to fray. There Sister Virginia Maria remained for thirteen years, until the hierarchy, either moved by her ‘repentance’ or its own convenience, saw fit to loose from those walls a spectre in the shape of a woman.

She lived thereafter—if such ghostly continuance may be called life—within the Monastery of Saint Margaret, her frame doubtless sorely enfeebled, until she reached seventy-four. Her endurance, perchance, may be viewed as a quiet defiance, a sermon preached against the cruelty which clothed itself in piety’s robe.

Across the centuries her legend hath been stirred anew by the arts. In Eriprando Visconti’s film of 1969, The Lady of Monza (also known as The Awful Story of the Nun of Monza), the renowned British actress Anne Heywood lendeth once more a voice unto the tormented sister—a cry rising out of stone and sorrow. Through her portrayal we behold the eternal strife betwixt faith and flesh, puissance and conscience. History nameth it sin; posterity perceiveth therein the fierce and trembling labour of survival.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Where the wholesome became dangerous simply by breathing: Nancy Cameron, POTM for January 1974

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Sun, stones, and smiles at the English seaside: Jean Kent, 29 June 1921 to 30 November 2013

Jean Kent—who departed this mortal stage upon this day in 2013, aged ninety—was one of the most English of stars: one whose brightness seldom voyaged far abroad, yet whose craft was subtly interwoven with the very substance of British cinema. Born in London and ascending through the ranks of Gainsborough Pictures during the fragile post-war years, she came to embody the distinctly British concord of grace, gentle wit, and quiet, discerning feeling.

From the mid-1940s through the following decade, her name did shine upon the marquees of an industry labouring to recover its confidence after the lean austerity of war. To domestic audiences she stood as a pledge of continuance—glamour without prodigality, sophistication without vanity—and she played the screen heroine with a natural restraint now almost lost to the art.

Abroad she was never a household name, yet at home she represented something vital: the assurance that British cinema might stand firm upon its own aesthetic footing, cultivating composure where Hollywood paraded its marvels. An age when understatement bore the lustre of magnificence, and Jean Kent was its most radiant exemplar.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Sir Winston Churchill on the reality of public opinion

“There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion,” stated Winston Churchill—a remark that lands with eerie foresight in the age of dictatorial algorithms and mass hysteria, wherein opinion is made a merchandised trade, and the mob a marketplace. One may well conceive the old war-dog beholding the endless scroll of social babble, and judging—after his wonted fashion and without the least strain of hyperbole—that our civilisation had clean parted company with its wits.

Born on 30 November 1874 amidst the rolling fields of West Oxfordshire, and sprung of an American mother of notable grace and an English father of noble blood yet scant forbearance, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill embodied a species of Englishman now almost extinct. A lover of cigars, whisky, and the English language in equal measure, he stood as the living antithesis of his nemesis, the teetotal vegetarian tyrant across the Channel. Churchill’s vices were human; his virtues, monumental.

By any reckoning, the twentieth century’s most formidable statesman—a relic of another age even whilst he lived, and yet utterly needful to his own time. In an era that prized shallow cries above substance, he wielded words as others wield artillery; and when civilisation hung by a thread, it was his voice—gravelled, resolute, and adamant—that held the rampart fast.

In today’s absurd universe, one with many echoes of the atmosphere that led to the Second World War, Churchill’s spectre is more needed than ever. Yet I discern much of his iron resolve in Volodymyr Zelensky: a witness that greatness, however blemished, once walked amongst mortal men, and that valour, when once uttered aloud, may yet ring forth with truth.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Jean Harlow: caught mid-thought between sin and shampoo

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Elke Sommer and the art of living unapologetically

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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Ann Rutherford, 2 November 1917 – 11 June 2012

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Dixie Lee, 4 November 1909 – 1 November 1952

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

source unknown

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

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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}

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.