Although the doctors explained she would not be able to have children, they had not expressly diagnosed her with anything life-threatening.

The Wilder Shores of Love was published in 1954, and I first read it at the age of 15 in 1969. I was living with my parents on an archeological excavation in Iran, and greedily reading my way through the dig's library. The Wilder Shores of Love was included in the dig shelves of Ross Macdonald mysteries and Angélique historical romances. Recommendation: Unless you’re a total Lawrence of Arabia / French Foreign Legion fan, you might want to pass on this one. Finally the very brief but intense life of Isabelle Eberhardt, born in Switzerland but with multiple languages and streams of cultural influence throughout Europe, despite her desperate desire to be in the desert. Living one of those lives that seems to race itself to its own finishing line, as if all along knowing it did not have the time others would have to fully form and express itself, it all came in a rush and proved its own demise by its awareness of living on that most challenging of lines, always conscious of death. During the filming of Hanky Panky the pair remained friends, but when Radner officially divorced her husband in 1982 they instantly reconnected and became inseparable. This book is actually a very engaging account of four women who threw off their corsets, shouted "to hell with convention" and decided to go and get some action in the Middle East. The four women in question are Isabel Burton who pursued and married Richard Francis Burton with what can only be described as frightening determination, Jane Digby el-Mezrab ( a proper English lady in both senses of the word), Aimee Du Becq de Rivery (cousin of Josephine Bonaparte) and Isabelle Eberhardt (the cross-dressing linguist). All four women came from educated, upper class families but sought an escape in the desert, and normally in the arms of men who society would have deemed utterly inappropriate at the time.There are, undoubtedly, books more boring to read than this one; but my hope is that neither of us will ever have to read any of them. Physicians immediately enrolled the actress in chemotherapy but her treatments were often bombarded by reporters looking for information on her condition and to speak to her husband. Oscar Wilde love quote “When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.” Jane Digby's story is her succession of husbands, before she married Sheikh Abdul Medjuel El Mezrab is Syria. He was twenty years her junior, but she remained married to him for thirty years. She lived part of the year in Bedouin tents, the other in the city of Homs. 1807 - 1881.

Use italics (lyric) and bold (lyric) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part The New York Times noted later that year: “All of Mr Wilder’s future plans appear to include Miss Radner.”

We can agree about the “twentieth century disintegration”, that’s probably true enough. After about 1750, for some complicated reason, women’s choices as to how to live as individual humans in their own right became increasingly limited, so that by the later nineteenth they were down to about two – ministering angels or whores, for the most part an unbridgeable division. Twentieth century ‘feminism’ was mostly about breaking these stereotypes, never entirely successful and since arguably even less so. But in a way the geographical factor is incidental, unless it represents warmth and the need for less, or less restrictive, clothing, in itself suggestive to the Northern imagination of sensuality and ‘freedom’ though in fact as many or more social restrictions operate in the East as in the West and the Eastern countries have now become a target, accurately or otherwise, for those Western women worried about the ‘oppression’ of their oriental sisters. And as to the last sentence, that’s largely incomprehensible to the average man, for whom “love” is just another adventure amongst many other possibilities. To the male characters in this book it meant nothing much at all. Of course they loved the women they were involved with, but in a different way; it was not the be-all-end-all of their existences, it was not “a means of individual expression, liberation and fulfilment. That came from other wider and more diverse sources, and here we meet the eternal predicament known as the battle of the sexes, most strikingly represented in the first and longest in this collection of biographical essays.