دانلود رمان انگلیسی “در دفاع از او”

Watch her, Anna Finbow, as she approaches the Royal Courts of Justice in a glossy Land Cruiser. The windows are dark, so it’s not immediately clear who is inside yet, but the photographers sense that, finally, this must be her. Abruptly, they break out of their conversations, turn, and point their lenses, jostling for the right position to take her picture. The car door opens to the sound of cheers and some heckling. A woman in her fifties gazes out. Pivoting on the leather seat, she raises her chin and slips carefully out of the car, pausing only when an assistant, someone new, passes her phone and a box-shaped handbag. She’s wearing her favorite square sunglasses, and her dark hair is blow-dried firmly in place like a helmet. When her lawyer approaches, Anna greets her with a kiss on each cheek. Together, they link arms. You must know my old boss, Anna Finbow. Her smile will be familiar from Anna’s Advent, the festive cookery show—now in its tenth season— that runs throughout December. She will have smirked at you in print from the masthead of the lifestyle column that she pens in the weekend newspaper. Chances are, you’ll own one of Anna’s collectible ceramics somewhere, too. An eggcup, or perhaps even a cereal bowl, in one of her famous designs. Finbow Flora—a cottage-kitsch, filigree pattern of intersecting willow leaves and little daisies—which she glazed onto almost everything she made. Nauseatingly chintz, I always thought, but that’s what Anna’s brand represented. Her name was synonymous with a lost vision of Britain: rosebuds over the door, cricket on the village green, a huge kitchen filled with happy children. A myth, basically. A fiction that Anna’s bitter courtroom feud will soon expose. There was a time when Anna wasn’t so sweet. She had hellcat years, back in the early nineties, when she was still with Albion. That was her band, which she joined as a singer when she was twenty-four years old and completely off her head. I would feel uneasy as a little girl when I saw her on my parents’ television—an impish, punky muse in flamboyant outfits and penciled-on beauty spots. Witty and outrageous; our nation’s cause for concern.