Bitches All: Dry Wit and Vermouth

...But then the bar opened; Dorothy Parker would have approved. The poet, short story writer, Hollywood script doctor, critic, and civil rights campaigner is now better known for drinking, partying and quipping her way through the Twenties and Thirties.

She was a founder member of the Algonquin Round Table, the group of writers and critics which met at the same table in the Algonquin hotel, Manhattan, each day. There, she spent countless long lunches and even longer nights with everybody from F Scott Fitzgerald and Edna Ferber to Noel Coward, Robert Benchley and Harpo Marx.

This bitchy coterie of friends, widely known as the Vicious Circle, had New York enthralled - their witticisms, insults and antics reported in the newspapers as slavishly as any Heat spread. And Mrs Parker was always there, ready with a softly spoken knife to the heart - 'a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth', as the venomous critic Alexander Woollcott described her.