A STAR FALL, A PHONE CALL, IT JOINS ALL: Perhaps Tina Brown dipping her pen into more arsenic than usual (even for her) when describing the Lewinsky affair and its aftermath is due to the “interesting parallels between Brown’s and Lewinsky’s career,” Neo-Neocon writes:

Brown alternates between sympathy for Monica Lewinsky and approbation, although she leans more to the sympathy side. That’s not surprising, since there are some interesting parallels between Brown’s and Lewinsky’s career, although the British Brown was tremendously much more successful with her own sexual escapades as a young woman. It helped that, at least for quite a while, she was also quite good at the publishing business, specializing in making cold properties hot. But it’s also the case that she got her start by being taken up in her early 20s by literary lights with whom she’d slept.

A tiny bit later on, one of them turned out to be the publisher of the British Sunday Times Harold Evans, who left his wife and three kids for Brown in the mid-70s. They married in 1981 and are still together, so their relationship seems to have stood the test of time, unlike that of the much-more-ill-fated Lewinsky and her married paramour. But at the beginning there were more parallels with Lewinsky than the mere fact that Brown had an affair with a married man: Evans was Brown’s powerful boss, and she was about twenty-five while he was about fifty years old. It’s not such a stretch to imagine that, when Brown writes, “Other women can often be the worst at cutting any slack towards the love interest in a sex scandal” she might be thinking of her own experience.

Read the whole thing.