The Illuminating Diary of a Professional LadyReading Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes “A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would…
Two centuries after William Hogarth published his engravings of the decline and fall of Tom Rakewell, Rebecca West wrote a morality tale of decline and fall updated for the C20th –The Modern “Rake’s Progress” 1934. Eighteenth-century Rakewell was the spendthrift, dissolute son of a rich merchant who goes to London and wastes his money on luxurious living, prostitution, and gambling…