Lewinsky's Testimony

RFK: A CANDID BIOGRAPHY

51st State

Last night was Jack Lemmon night on BBC2. Why?

LIKE MARY Poppins, the thermos flask is practically perfect in every way. Reliable and comforting, it dispenses gaspingly hot tea or frosty iced coffee as the vagaries of English weather dictate; it requires no hi-tech palaver to perform its minor miracle, and it is of sturdy, sensible and unchanging disposition.

With squealing gold-diggers and hymns to roughage, a revival of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has its comic moments. But where's the raunch?

Not the first night:

Marilyn Monroe, the Hollywood legend, will become the new face of Barbie to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the actress's death on 4 August.

So much for the candle in the wind. Marilyn Monroe would be 71 on 5 August were she still alive. But the blaze of publicity never wanes.

RESULTS OF THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY / PANASONIC WRITING COMPETITION AND THE IoS / DALER-ROWNEY YOUNG CARTOONIST COMPETITION 1997

Sir: Regarding correspondence on Marilyn Monroe's legendary proportions (letters, 20 and 24 December), there is something I really must get off my chest.

Sir: I am sorry to disappoint Dr David Ashton but Marilyn Monroe was not "voluptuous" (Letters, 20 December). He appears to have accepted the myth, as did The Independent in its feature on 16 December that Monroe was a size 16. Monroe had the gloriously thin figure of 35-22-35. Can the "circumferentially challenged" now stop hiding behind this myth?

In 'Iron John', Robert Bly told men to go back to the forest. In his new book he's telling them to grow up. This is an extract

Do you remember what you were doing when you heard that Mary Millington was dead? Thought not. But do you remember who she was when she was alive? She was the muse of David Sullivan, the country's pornographer-in-chief, who somehow achieved a newsworthiness out of all proportion to anything she had on offer. She was "ideal for glamour", as one photographer told her, tongue dangling somewhere in front of his solar plexus. In the diplomatic argot of the sex industry, that meant she was a midget with a rear the size of a Space Hopper: built not for clothes-horse work but for other branches of equestrianism.