Molly Parkin, who has died aged 93, was not just a celebrated artist and fashion editor, says Jane Fryer in the Daily Mail, but a “provocateur” – and more open about her “riotous sex life” than anyone I’ve ever met. Beyond her “18 or 19 fiancés” and two husbands, there were “very jolly” liaisons with the playwright Anthony Schaffer, the architect Cedric Price, and an aristocrat called Hector who gave her “magnums of champagne, diamonds and a 1932 Rolls-Royce”. In her fifties, she claimed to have pleasured an entire Welsh rugby team; in her sixties, she found herself in an underground garage after sleeping with “an Arab whose Rolls-Royce I’d flagged down in Sloane Square”. Her one regret was not bedding the entire Real Madrid football team when she met them in Paris.

Born in 1932 in south Wales’s Garw Valley, Parkin effortlessly topped her class in English and art, winning a scholarship to Goldsmiths aged 17. On moving to London, she went to a nightclub, had her first drink and lost her virginity within a week – “no hanging about”, as she put it. She later married the art dealer Michael Parkin, joining the “King’s Road party set” and driving around Chelsea in her canary yellow Rolls-Royce. After her marriage broke down, she opened a bistro in Belgravia which lasted a mere six weeks – and only that long because she serviced the health inspector in the kitchens – then enjoyed a wildly successful fashion journalism career with a signature style that was something of a “cross between Liz Taylor and a giant purple Quality Street”. Her 1993 autobiography, Moll, featured a nude portrait of herself on the back cover, provocatively accompanied by a quote from the Garw Gazette: “She’s a disgrace to the valley.”

The link between the death of William Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet in 1596 and his tragedy Hamlet a few years later was the subject of Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed 2020 novel Hamnet, says Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Now it has been transformed into an “ingenious and impassioned” film, which follows the not-yet-famous playwright (played with “intelligent force” by Paul Mescal) and the whimsical, witch-like Agnes Hathway (an “unselfconsciously beguiling” Jessie Buckley) as they navigate marriage and the agonising loss of a child. Despite the tragic subject matter, it leaves you feeling joy at the human ability to reckon with struggle through love.

One of the virtues most regrettably absent from our present landscape is gallantry, says Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. At heart, gallantry is a kind of moral courage with style, with class, with a little “shine and burnish”. We live in a culture of “winners who must win”, and who can’t resist telling everyone else they’ve won, over and over, like Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez with their ghastly wedding. We are the richest and most glamorous, we are living the best lives, George Clooney is an old friend. “Are you not impressed?” This kind of behaviour is ungallant. “Gallantry never says it won.”

One snowy night in 2012 in New York’s Times Square, police officer Larry DePrimo saw a homeless man with no shoes. He went to a nearby shop, bought a pair of insulated boots and socks with his own money, and helped the man put them on. A passerby happened to take a photo and reporters tracked DePrimo down. He said he hadn’t realised anyone had noticed, it was just “something I had to do”. Jackie Kennedy held her poise and maintained public ritual in the funeral of her husband, days after witnessing his violent death, because “the country needed it”. Queen Elizabeth II was gallant throughout life but especially at the end when, old and unwell, she continued to meet with new prime ministers, some of whom she would have understood to be silly. Thomas More was gallant on the scaffold at Tower Hill, when he comforted his executioner and repositioned his beard on the block, joking that it had “committed no treason”. In an age when people are obsessed with claiming their rights and rejecting their duties, we need gallantry more than ever.