But her story – a classic rags-to-riches tale – fixed the attention, starting with some nicely squalid scenes from the Bassey household of the 1930s, a mixed-race family of God knows how many (but one fewer when the father got banged up for sexual offences, never to be seen again), living hand to mouth on tuppenny take-outs from the chippy.
"There!" he said, his eyes fixed on a tell-tale shape in a snarl of skeletal limbs 100 feet above the forest floor.
However, further research has concluded that fairy tales never had a fixed form, and regardless of literary influence, the tellers constantly altered them for their own purposes.
Her self-deprecating tale of the time Tony Curtis fixed her up on a disastrous blind date with Frank Sinatra is one for the books.
American writer Sherwood has one eye firmly fixed on Hollywood, but this is still an oddly touching tale.
In fact, the play and the 1960 film (which has no preface) have fixed most people's image of that event as firmly as Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities has forever fixed our highly inaccurate image of the French Revolution.
These are the dry, deft, slightly engaging tales that so many of our writers produce already, without any rules other than fixed tradition.
By compounding an explicitly justified medical invasion with an implied sexual assault, Machen's tale dramatizes the unsettling indeterminacy of consent at a time when its legal definition has supposedly been fixed.
Each TAL effector (TALE) repeat comprises 33 35 amino acids and recognizes one specific DNA base through a highly variable residue at a fixed position in the repeat.
The fairy tale itself became popular among the précieuses of upper-class France (1690 1710), and among the tales told in that time were the ones of La Fontaine and the Contes of Charles Perrault (1697), who fixed the forms of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.
