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Books

The mad, bad and sad life of Dusty Springfield

A review of Dusty: An Intimate Portrait, by Karen Bartlett. The sexually repressed and mentally unstable singer’s rise to stardom was as meteoric as her fall

2 August 2014

9:00 AM

2 August 2014

9:00 AM

Dusty: An Intimate Portrait Karen Bartlett

The Robson Press, pp.340, £20, ISBN: 9781849546416

Call me a crazy old physiognomist, but my theory is that you can always spot a lesbian by her big thrusting chin. Celebrity Eskimo Sandi Toksvig, Ellen DeGeneres, Jodie Foster, Clare Balding, Vita Sackville-West, God love them: there’s a touch of Desperate Dan in the jaw-bone area, no doubt the better to go bobbing for apples.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £16, Tel: 08430 600033. Roger Lewis has written books on Anthony Burgess, Laurence Olivier, Peter Sellers and Christopher Hawtrey.

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