Elena Bowes

I caught up with English author and biographer Claire Tomalin about her best-selling memoir A Life of My Own. I loved it and can’t recommend it highly enough. Still working, the 85-year-old author shared her thoughts on moving on from sadness, finding love late in life (she married playwright and author Michael Frayn in 1993 when they were both 60) and her favourite London libraries.

I caught up with English author and biographer Claire Tomalin about her best-selling memoir A Life of My Own. I loved it and can’t recommend it highly enough. Still working, the 85-year-old author shared her thoughts on moving on from sadness, finding love late in life (she married playwright and ...

Between the fiasco that is Brexit on one side of the pond and the longest government shutdown in the US’s history on the other, sometimes I just want to crawl under the sheets and look at New Yorker cartoons.
For others in want of a momentary escape, I recommend Ellen Barry’s humorous article in The New York Times about Parliament’s - small in stature large in confidence and annoyance factor - Speaker of the House John Bercow. While the health minister has called Bercow a ‘stupid sanctimonious dwarf,’ a French radio station begs to differ, awarding Bercow ‘European of the week’ for standing up to Theresa May’s government.
I’m just glad Barry made me laugh. ... See more

Speaker John Bercow has overturned precedent to give the British Parliament a bigger role in Brexit.

New story... http://bit.ly/NYResolutionsDone

Be nicer. So simple, and yet so not. That NY’s Resolution lasted a day. I won’t go into what happened – Stretch has already had far too much airtime. Why bother having a resolution at all, one might ask? Old habits die hard. When I was young, my father used to go around the dinner...

A recent design story ...http://bit.ly/SublimeSeasideOasis

Designers Jenny Robson and Amy Leonard of Robson Leonard Design took cues from nature to create incredible interiors for this New England getaway.

Let me just give you a typical weekend... http://bit.ly/LivingWithStretch

Loose Ends by Devorah Blachor. Sign This Before You say A Word – I loved this humorous article in the NYT. A wife writes the terms upon which her husband can tell her about his day, the terms are binding and in effect the minute he steps over the threshold of their shared domicile. One...

Earlier this year I wrote about The Madonna of the Mountains, a book by my dear friend Elise Valmorbida. The Madonna of the Mountains is on the national fiction shortlist for the prestigious Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2019. I wholeheartedly recommend this book if you are looking for a great story to get lost in. For all those so inclined, please take a moment to cast a vote in the peoples choice award here: https://wheelercentre.wufoo.com/forms/peoples-choice-award/

Melbourne’s home for smart, passionate and entertaining public talks on every topic. Across 200+ events each year, you’ll find our speakers sharing their

I like this article because the author Sarah Ruhl points out how friendships rarely get written about because of their very nature - they are calm and loving and can last for years. No drama. And yet, friendships are what sustains many of us. They are my oxygen. I adore them. Friends are for life, not just for Christmas. I always feel better after a good meal or a long walk chatting with my closest girlfriends. We cover life’s essentials and nonessentials. It’s effortless. Conversely I remember a boyfriend where there was always drama. He excelled at playing hard to get, a quality I have no patience for in a girlfriend. And now that I am older and wiser, I have no patience for it in a boyfriend. Maybe that’s the secret to romance, ask first whether you would want that person as a friend. Are they reliable, funny, smart, curious, compassionate, and sensitive? Are they good listeners, interesting talkers? And only when they have passed the rigorous friend test, only then can you ask whether you are attracted to them. https://nyti.ms/2EcAQtR ... See more

What my student taught me about one of life’s most important relationships.

If you had to single out your favourite hormone, which would it be? Why? Randi Hutter Epstein Author #Aroused #hormones http://bit.ly/ElenaAroused

I am not a science person. It was always my worst subject at school. Even the easy classes were hard. So it was with a slight unease that I picked up my friend Randi Hutter Epstein’s latest book, Aroused, the History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything. Fortunately, Randi is a g...

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Nina Campbell who was not only an Annabel’s devotee, but helped decorate the illustrious club with its talented owner, the late Mark Birley. Nina had wonderful stories to tell. Annabel's Mayfair Nina Campbell http://bit.ly/2Al9YUT

Everything—from the iconic Bodhisattva to a porcelain urinal—must go.

Who doesn’t love Michelle Obama? After reading this article in the Washington Post (see below) about her touching and honest memoir, Becoming, I love her even more. Sadly, she has no political ambitions. In her memoir, Obama talks about everything from her deep love for her disabled father who died in 1991to the racist slurs she had to endure as First Lady. When called “an angry black women”, she writes how she wanted to ask her detractors, which word mattered to them the most. Is it ‘angry’ or ‘black’ or ‘woman’?

Points that struck me in the book: how important our childhoods are in shaping us - about a third of the book is devoted to Obama's family, her disabled father, her parents' ambitions and love for their kids growing up in a cramped apartment in 1960’s South Side Chicago. She always knew she was loved and that gave her the confidence to believe in herself when others didn’t. When her high school counsellor advised her not to apply to Princeton, where her brother already was a student, she ignored him, applied and was accepted.

She is funny about her husband. When she first met him she was struck by how he was “oddly free from doubt, though at first glance it was hard to understand why.” She also writes about how while deeply in love with the man who would become her husband she also worried early on in the relationship that his strong intellect and ambition could swallow hers.

In Becoming, Obama openly discusses the strains in their marriage - when she and her husband had difficulty conceiving and he was gone a lot on the campaign trail. She writes that she was “a working full-time mother with a half-time spouse.’ Not wanting her kids to think life started when Dad got home. “We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.” Obama writes about struggles that many women have, whether they are black or not. “When they go low, we go high.” She is one dignified lady.
https://wapo.st/2PkOxgU ... See more

The former first lady doesn’t tiptoe around the ugly stuff in “Becoming.”