The Song: “I Fooled Around and Fell in Love.” 1975 tune by the otherwise respectable ElvinBishop (as sung by Mickey Thomas, the man who built a city on rock and roll, regrettably). The Culprit. “I must have been through about a million girls.” Crowing about one’s conquests is nothing new—Guillaume IX, the earliest troubadour whose work…
Vanity Fair, published in 1847, follows the adult lives of two women opposite in breeding, personality, ambition, hair color, and pretty much everything else. Becky Sharp is a 19th-century Mean Girl, unleashing her inner sociopath at every opportunity, while Amelia Sedley is a naïve wallflower who barely provokes an opinion of any kind. I, for…