Bookends: Short and sweet

Before texts and Twitter there were postcards. Less hi-tech, but they kept people in touch. Angela Carter (pictured above) and Susannah Clapp were friends, and over the years, postcards from Carter arrived from wherever her travels took her. They could be quirky, surreal — from America a huge chicken swallowing a truck; the Statue of Liberty drowning in a lake. Others were greetings, scribbled comments, hand-drawn cartoons.

Fourteen are scattered through Susannah Clapp’s A Card from Angela Carter (Bloomsbury, £10): black-and-white reproductions evoking experiences riotous with colour,  charting the progress of a turbulent life that ended too soon.

Carter died of lung cancer in 1992 aged 51. She had loved baroque cinema architecture, and a pink memorial notification invited friends to the Ritzy, Brixton for ‘a celebration of her life and works’.

This book is precisely that: it captures her humour, and describes her obsessions, travels, lefty politics, cats, her husband and son, her works, and their author – witty, unpredictable, fierce.