and this tells me more than I want to know about all the stuff I’d really rather not know about

and this tells me more than I want to know about all the stuff I’d really rather not know about

The BBC is in a terrible state It’s a form of professional suicide for me to say so. I’ll probably stop being invited on to any of those radio programmes where they let you research a script, write it and deliver it on air for only slightly less in total than a plumber would charge to pop round and tell you he’d left his tools in the van But it’s true. The man behind the silk roses and the dragonfly hatpin shown here, Halley, 28, abandoned a career in menswear design four years ago to indulge his obsession with feathers: dying, painting and flocking them to create filigree neckpieces, pins and earrings. Like Treacy, his work is available through a few well-chosen retailers, or – if you fancy owning the accessory or hat of your dreams – they both work to commission. The question is, are your dreams wild enough?Main picture, left: silver ‘wave’ hat, to order only, by Philip Treacy, as beforeAbove: silk roses, pounds 50, by Erik Halley, from Erickson Beamon, as before, and Selfridges, Oxford Street, W1 (enq: 0171 629 1234); black ‘top’, as before To order direct from Erik Halley, call 00 331 44 79 04 35. Mixed with porcupine quills or even, on occasion, optic fibres, these pieces have a distinctly gothic, belle epoque feel that perfectly complements much late-Nineties fashion – one reason why Alexander McQueen, Chanel and, most recently, Jeremy Scott have all used Halley accessories in their catwalk shows. These are people who can get away with wearing Treacy’s more outrageous and expensive creations; but mere mortals with a taste for the unusual can find his ready-to-wear line in department stores, or look for the commercial range he has designed for Debenhams (though prices will still be anything up to pounds 400).While not yet as well-known to the man or woman in the street as the master milliner, Frenchman Erik Halley has been called the ‘Philip Treacy of accessories’.

These otherworldly accessories may look as if they have been made by the same deft hand (a fairy? an elf?), but are in fact the work of two separate, and very individual, designers.The hats are, of course, by Irish milliner Philip Treacy, 30. Now a world-renowned craftsman, his bold designs are sported by the rich, the eccentric and the beautiful, from Boy George (does he ever take off that exaggerated black fedora?), to Honor Fraser and Isabella Blow. Philip Treacy’s famously intricate hats and Erik Halley’s gothic, feather-based accessories were simply made for each other, says Melanie Rickey

Right: red feather hat, to order, from Philip Treacy, 69 Elizabeth Street, SW1 (enq: 0171 259 9605); black strapless ‘top’ made using length of fabric
Main picture, right: ‘dragonfly’ hatpin, pounds 85, by Erik Halley, from Erickson Beamon, 38 Elizabeth Street, SW1 (enq: 0171 259 0202); black ‘top’, as beforeDANGEROUS-LOOKING spikes A hat born out of Grimm’s Tales by way of Robin Hood A pin that acts as a perch for a dragonfly. We tied tea towels on our heads as milkmaid scarves over Laura Ashley dresses; we could recite the names of Tess’s cows, looked drifty in white nighties and generally turned into soulful pests of an oversensitive and narcissistic variety.Have you re-read it? I’ve read it eight or nine times; the same copy scrawled with notes from school friends. I’d rate it above all other Hardy, and I continue to recommend it.Joanna Briscoe’s latest novel ‘Skin’, is out in paperback (Phoenix pounds 6.99).. I still re-read sections: Tess in the Talbothays garden, Tess walking in the pre-dawn fields with Angel Clare. I read the whole novel every couple of years.Do you recommend it? It’s full of creaking pedantry, and will never quite speak to the adult soul as it does to the female adolescent’s, but I still believe it’s a masterpiece It’s with me to this day; it’s under my skin.

It saved me from my Dartmoor schoolgirl’s fate of death by muddy field. After years of despising the countryside with a conviction verging on mania, I fell suddenly and euphorically in love with all things pastoral, and took to drifting for miles across the meadows as a tragic milkmaid, keeping one eye out for an Angel Clare. My superlative English teacher, Tony Dixon, was obviously equally bewitched, which only enhanced the whole experience. It’s a perfect novel on the grand Victorian scale, in which Hardy is so clearly in love with his protagonist, that the reader is drawn into unavoidable shared passion.

Why did it strike you so much? Tess is truly panoramic, yet highly wrought with the intensity of private emotion, so I was carried along by its sweep and enthralled by its vast horizons, while identifying with every throb of hope and loss. When did you first read it? The summer before A levels, as a bedroom- bound hybrid of unpleasant swot and raging romantic, I read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and it was inevitably love. He was a very canny sort of fool, perhaps not unlike the Emperor Claudius in Robert Graves’s historical novels – which, needless to say, he had read.. Eisenstein had to eat humble pie once or twice in the late 1930s, and had an uncomfortable late-night chat with Stalin about “improving the quality” of Ivan the Terrible, Part Two, but he was allowed to spend several years abroad in Europe and America and escaped the imprisonment and execution that were the fate of so many, including his friends Isaac Babel and Vsevolod Meyerhold.

He surely had homosexual tendencies, but when it comes down to it, Bergan is unable to name a single person with whom his subject had sex.This elusive quality proved no small asset in life, and not only because homosexuality was illegal in the USSR. His marriage apparently remained unconsummated, as did his passion for the actor Grigori Alexandrov. Bergan suggests areas of psychological conflict but sensibly leaves it to the reader to do the analysis. Eisenstein’s enigmatic sexuality causes his biographer the greatest problem: the film-maker, who was also a gifted cartoonist, made a speciality of obscene drawings (none of them reproduced here, unfortunately). Perhaps the most persuasive aspect of Bergan’s account of the man is that it leaves us in no doubt that he was also one of the most brilliant and enquiring minds of his time. He was not always good at expressing his theories: pupils testified both to the excitement that they felt in his lectures but the difficulty of following his reasoning. Father and son did not get on well and, indeed, supported opposite sides after the Revolution – though at the time the younger Eisenstein was in Moscow and his father in Berlin.