Killing My Own Snakes: A Memoir

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Dame Ann Elizabeth Mary Leslie, DBE (28 January 1941 – 25 June 2023) was a British journalist who wrote for the Daily Mail. Kindle formatting again lets the book down in a few areas - Cape town is always 'Gape Town', Muhammed Ali 'Muhammed All', SO becomes '50' but this is not so bad as to detract from the book. I’ve been teaching people about snakes for a while now, and I know full well that there are people who are ready to change and people that aren’t. Her considerable charm and intelligence have not only taken her to the peak of her trade; they have managed to get her into places that other journalists can only look at with envy – such as into Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev's private apartments during a summit meeting, or around Imelda Marcos's shoe cupboard.

Please remember it can take some time for your bank or credit card company to process and post the refund too. More recently, dressed like a scatty granny, she's been able to disarm trigger-happy Israeli conscripts and even Mugabe's thugs. Exchanging Valentines can be an awkward process, especially when you consider “Vinegar Valentines” and other snarky sentiments - whatever your tastes, enjoy the sweet and sour cards alike in this gallery! In 2002, World of Books Group was founded on an ethos to do good, protect the planet and support charities by enabling more goods to be reused. You may not agree with her political views, but she’s certainly seen enough to earn the right to those views.

Though the author succumbs to smugness at times and aspires to look unflappable and unshockable, I think those particular asides are how she would have LIKED to have felt and behaved at the time of trauma and danger. A marvellous memoir of great insight and wit from one of Britain's most formidable and accomplished journalists. But nowhere is it written that teacher-centered classrooms must be ruthlessly controlled environments of churchlike stillness. Even somebody like me, who vociferously opposes the honours system, can look at Ann Leslie and say: now, that's a Dame. Then they suddenly stopped in astonishment: nobody, absolutely nobody, had ever come trudging up their gun-bristled hill wearing white gloves, a white-and-yellow Horricks frock, and carrying a white handbag.

You're keeping a good man out of a job,' he snarled at her, a theme taken up by his sidekick who declared that he didn't object to women working in newspapers - just so long as it was other newspapers. After graduating she began her career at the Manchester office of the Daily Express, where the news editor took an instant dislike to her - she was a southerner, educated and – worst of all – female. At a time when journalists are ever-more pressured to see the world through Google, Leslie's career is a testament to the narcotic of running towards the fire and seeing the story for yourself. Sexism, whether of the casual or institutional variety, is just one of the many 'snakes' Dame Ann Leslie has had to contend with during a glittering career in which she has been feted as one of the finest journalists of her generation. She was born in Rawalpindi – then in India – in 1941 to an oilman father, and spent her early childhood skipping through Basra and the Raj.I’m teaching an Algebra 10-12 class, and the kids start packing up their stuff with fifteen minutes to the bell.

The actual book is interesting although I was more interested in the stories she reported than the earlier chapters about her early years. After two were gone, the other three realized I was serious and shut up, after growling a bit about unfairness. In the Reuters/Press Gazette launch of the Newspaper Hall of Fame she was listed as one of the forty most influential journalists in the last forty years. The story of how this happened is studded with the best pound-for-pound anecdotes you'll find anywhere. The ultimate Valentine's Day countdown - here are 10 romantic gestures to help sweep your partner off their feet!

After graduating she began her career at the Manchester office of the Daily Express , where the news editor took an instant dislike to her—she was a southerner, educated and—worst of all—female. In David Randall’s book, The Great Reporters (celebrating the 13 greatest British and American journalists of all time), the author profiled Ann Leslie as ‘The most versatile reporter ever. Why did she tramp through the guerrilla camps of Rhodesia, holding her machine gun over her pregnancy bump? Occasionally, she bigs herself up a bit, sneaking into places where lesser mortals fail, usually by putting on a dotty-old-lady act, in a way that's not always convincing, but this is a rattling good read and will while away several happy hours. It is a risky game, of course, although you'd hardly know it from her nonchalant descriptions of the scrapes she's been in.