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The Media

April 1999

The women come & go

by James Bowman

When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.
—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

One of the funniest things in that comic treasure-trove, Monica’s Story by Andrew Morton, is the revelation that T. S. Eliot is la Lewinsky’s “favorite poet”—indeed, he is referred to therein as “her beloved” T. S. Eliot. Now there’s a thought to make the Old Possum sit up in his grave! As a bit of transparently disingenuous image-mongering by the loathsome Morton, hitherto best known as the second-hand biographer of and mouthpiece for the late Princess of Wales, this nugget of information is only surpassed by his tribute to Monica as an angel of mercy to the “homeless man living in a doorway near her hotel to whom she took food and drink every day.” With the same purpose, Monica herself ...

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James Bowman is the author of Honor: A History (Encounter Books) and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, also published by Encounter (2008)
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 17 April 1999, on page 55
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