Hadley

Tessa Hadley, in After the Funeral, is at home with the short story because she is a master of non-elaboration. She leaves it to her readers to fill in the gaps, make judgments on the quiet. The pleasure is not unlike reading Jane Austen: we have the inside track on what is being said – we know more about her characters than they know about themselves. She pulls off the feat of being leisurely yet economical – there is no slack. As one of our finest novelists, she has, throughout her writing life, been a short story…

Tessa Hadley presents everything as fine at the front while it comes apart comprehensively at the back. The dozen short stories that comprise After the Funeral, her absorbing and thoroughly readable fourth collection, manage with a quiet dexterity the emotional situations that promote this kind of undoing.Lynette, central character of Dido’s Lament, bumps into – or is bumped into by – Toby, her ex of many years. The collision, and what they make of it, will maintain a certain ambivalence. Who actually bumped into whom?…

`The Young and the Restless` star Brett Hadley is no more. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Brett, 92, died on Wednesday. The news of his demise was shared by his close friend Darcy Lee. "He was a wonderful, sweet and kind man," she said. Hadley joined the daytime serial as the father of Doug Davidson`s Paul Williams in 1980 and remained with the show through 1990, when his character mysteriously disappeared. Born on September 25, 1930, in Louisville, Kentucky, Hadley attended the University of New Mexico to study…

Recent changes in the Hadley circulation strength. Credit: Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05903-1 In the tropics, above the equatorial rainforests and oceans, the strong solar radiation hitting Earth propels a stream of warm, moist air far upward. Once reaching the upper atmosphere, this stream moves in both hemispheres…

There is a sense in which Hadley Freeman’s Good Girls has been written by two authors: the anorexic teenager she once was and the recovered 44-year-old journalist with three children she now is (she was, until recently, a staff writer on the Guardian and, for almost a decade, its fashion correspondent). Anorexics tend to be unreliable witnesses when in the grip of the illness and, at times, there is an oddity about this book, a curious sense of separation between the suffering younger self and the aloof older self, but…

Hadley Freeman was 14 when a seemingly innocuous comment blew her life apart. Three years earlier her family had relocated from New York to London, and she enjoyed the special status that being American conferred on her among her British peers. But she struggled to find her place among teenage girls who were embracing bras and boys – “The grown-up world was pressing in, monsters making the door bulge inwards while I frantically tried to push it back.”On this particular day, Freeman was in a PE lesson at school, sitting on…

The year is 1967 and 40-year-old Phyllis Fischer is sitting at her dressing table applying lipstick ahead of an informal dinner she is hosting for the son of a family friend. Phyllis is married to Roger, a senior civil servant, with whom she has two children, Colette and Hugh, and is regarded as “an easy person. Easily made happy, glad to make others happy. She was pleased with her life.” And yet her comfortable commuter-belt existence is upended with the arrival of their dinner guest, Nicholas, a young socialist and…

It was at a Christmas party in the 1980s. I was very young then, living with my first husband and our three children – the youngest still breastfeeding – in an oversized, dilapidated Victorian house with orange and purple wallpaper, and nylon carpets which gave the children electric shocks. We were supposed to be doing the house up, but that was a joke, partly because we didn’t have any money and partly because my husband was working all hours, trying to get his architectural practice off the ground. At the end of each…

I started working at the Guardian in the summer of 2000 – not to write, but to look after a key. The key to the fashion cupboard, to be precise, ensuring no clothes for the fashion shoots were stolen. This was my primary role as the fashion assistant. Or, as I preferred to call myself – and say it with me as one, fellow Ghostbusters fans – the keymaster. And I will never have a job with more responsibility or power. Nonetheless, soon after I started, section editors asked which celebrities I’d like to interview. I was too…