A sphinx is a mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion. In Greek tradition, the sphinx has the head of a woman, the haunches of a lion, the wings of a bird, she is mythicised as merciless. Those who cannot answer her riddle suffer a fate typical in such mythological stories, as they are killed and eaten by this ravenous monster; this deadly version of a sphinx appears in the drama of Oedipus. Unlike the Greek sphinx, a woman, the Egyptian sphinx is shown as a man. In addition, the Egyptian sphinx was viewed as benevolent, but having a ferocious strength similar to the malevolent Greek version. Both were thought of as guardians, flank the entrances to temples. In European decorative art, the sphinx enjoyed a major revival during the Renaissance; the sphinx image very similar to the original Ancient Egyptian concept, was exported into many other cultures, albeit there interpreted quite differently due to translations of descriptions of the originals and through evolution of the concept in relation to other cultural traditions.

Sphinx depictions are associated with architectural structures such as royal tombs or religious temples. The oldest known sphinx was found 195 kilometres to the east at Körtik Tepe and was dated to 9,500 BCE; the largest and most famous sphinx is the Great Sphinx of Giza, situated on the Giza Plateau adjacent to the Great Pyramids of Giza on the west bank of the Nile River and facing east. The sphinx is located southeast of the pyramids. While the date of its construction is not known for certain, general consensus among egyptologists is that the head of the Great Sphinx bears the likeness of the pharaoh Khafra, while a fringe minority of late 20th century geologists have claimed evidence of water erosion in and around the Sphinx enclosure which would prove that the Sphinx predates Khafra, a claim, sometimes referred to as the Sphinx water erosion hypothesis, but which has little support among egyptologists. What names their builders gave to these statues is not known. At the Great Sphinx site, a 1400 BCE inscription on a stele belonging to the 18th dynasty pharaoh Thutmose IV lists the names of three aspects of the local sun deity of that period, Khepera–Rê–Atum.

Many pharaohs had their heads carved atop the guardian statues for their tombs to show their close relationship with the powerful solar deity Sekhmet, a lioness. Besides the Great Sphinx, other famous Egyptian sphinxes include one bearing the head of the pharaoh Hatshepsut, with her likeness carved in granite, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the alabaster sphinx of Memphis, Egypt located within the open-air museum at that site; the theme was expanded to form great avenues of guardian sphinxes lining the approaches to tombs and temples as well as serving as details atop the posts of flights of stairs to grand complexes. Nine hundred sphinxes with ram heads, representing Amon, were built in Thebes, where his cult was strongest; the Great Sphinx has become an emblem of Egypt appearing on its stamps and official documents. In the Bronze Age, the Hellenes had trade and cultural contacts with Egypt. Before the time that Alexander the Great occupied Egypt, the Greek name, was applied to these statues.

The historians and geographers of Greece wrote extensively about Egyptian culture. Herodotus called the ram-headed sphinxes Criosphinxes and called the hawk-headed ones Hieracosphinxes; the word sphinx comes from the Greek Σφίγξ from the verb σφίγγω, meaning "to squeeze", "to tighten up". This name may be derived from the fact that, in a pride of lions, the hunters are the lionesses, kill their prey by strangulation, biting the throat of prey and holding them down until they die. However, the historian Susan Wise Bauer suggests that the word "sphinx" was instead a Greek corruption of the Egyptian name "shesepankh", which meant "living image", referred rather to the statue of the sphinx, carved out of "living rock", than to the beast itself. Apollodorus describes the sphinx as having a woman's face, the body and tail of a lion and the wings of a bird. Pliny the Elder mentions. Statius describes her as a winged monster, with pallid cheeks, eyes tainted with corruption, plumes clotted with gore and talons on livid hands.

Sometimes, the wings are specified to be those of an eagle, the tail to be serpent-headed. There was a single sphinx in a unique demon of destruction and bad luck. According to Hesiod, she was a daughter of Orthrus and either Echidna or the Chimera, or even Ceto. According to Apollodorus and Lasus, she was a daughter of Typhon. All of these are chthonic figures from the earliest of Greek myths, before the Olympians ruled the Greek pantheon; the Sphinx is called Phix by Hesiod in line 326 of the TheogonyThe sphinx was the emblem of the ancient city-state of Chios, appeared on seals and the obverse side of coins from the 6th century BCE until the 3rd century CE. The Sphinx is said to have guarded the entrance to the Greek city of Thebes, asking a riddle to travellers to allow them passage; the exact riddle asked by the Sphinx was not specified by early tellers of the myth, was not standardized as the one given below until late in Greek history. It was said in late lore that Hera or Ares sent the Sphinx from her Aethiopian homeland (the Greeks always remembe

Daisy Pulls It Off is a comedy play by Denise Deegan, based on Winifred Norling's 1939 novel The Testing of Tansy. It is a parody of wholesome adventure stories about life in a 1920s girls' English boarding school, such as those by Angela Brazil; the original production of the play tested at the Nuffield Theatre in 1983 ran for 1,180 performances at the Globe Theatre. Energetic Daisy Meredith, a girl from a poor background, is forced to face and overcome snobbish prejudice and schoolgirl pranks from the wealthier girls, she and her best friend, zany Trixie Martin, search for the missing treasure that could save the fortunes of the exclusive Grangewood School for Young Ladies. Along the way, Daisy overcomes false accusations, saves the lives of her enemies and discovers that the mysterious stranger seen around the grounds is her long-lost father. After tryouts at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton in 1983, the play was staged in the West End at the Gielgud Theatre from April 1983 to February 1986, produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber and directed by David Gilmore.

It ran for 1,180 performances and toured for two years. Alexandra Mathie starred as Daisy; the play launched the careers of Lia Williams, Gabrielle Glaister and Samantha Bond. The production won the Drama Theatre Award for Best Comedy. Kate Buffery was nominated for an Olivier as Best Supporting Actress. Dewsbury Arts Group's 1989 production of the play was the scene of Victoria O'Keefe's last-ever stage role, before her untimely death at 21 in a car accident in 1990. A 2002 revival at the Lyric Theatre was directed by Gilmore and produced by Lloyd Webber. There was a 2008 UK tour. Similar to the unrelated series of St Trinian's films, the schoolgirls in professional productions are played by older actresses, the headmistress is played by a man; the family-friendly piece is a popular choice for school productions. A revived London production ran at the Arts Theatre in the West End from 19 January - 6 February 2010, it was directed by Nadine Hanwell. In 2018, the stage production revived starring Emily Elizabeth.

The show lasted from May 2018 to November 2018, when it closed for the final time as a professional performance. The last show was performed at Liverpool in the Liverpool Empire Theatre on November 19, 2018. Deegan, Denise. Daisy Pulls It Off: A Comedy. London: Samuel French. ISBN 0-573-11117-0. A review of the 2002 revival Albemarle archive site

The Cooperative Correspondence Club was a group of twenty-four women, living all over the United Kingdom, who wrote to each other in the form of a private correspondence magazine from 1936 to 1990. The CCC began in 1935 after one woman, writing under the pen name Ubique, wrote the following cry for help into the motherhood magazine the Nursery World. “Can any mother help me? I live a lonely life as I have no near neighbours. I cannot afford to buy a wireless... I get so down and depressed after the children are in bed and I am alone in the house... Can any reader suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude "thinking" and cost nothing! A hard problem I admit." Mothers from all over the country replied to Ubique’s letter, expressing that they too were struggling with similar feelings of boredom and loneliness. The women suggested. So many women replied that they decided to write in the form of a correspondence magazine so that everyone could be included. At the time that the women of the CCC came together, marriage bars were in place which meant that women in public service jobs were no longer allowed to work once they were married.

Alongside this was enormous societal pressure for women to be in the home and to spend their time working hard to be “ideal” housewives and mothers. Strict housekeeping and childrearing regimes were the norm. Typical days were filled by maintaining the household and religiously following the rules outlined by the childrearing expert of the time, Truby King, whose practices are seen as quite severe in modern times; this was a difficult time for middle class women in the UK because they were the first generation who chose to move away from their family homes to start their married life. Although this was their preference, it meant that the women did not have their mothers or grandmothers near them so they had limited support with raising their families. All of these circumstances resulted in many well educated, bright women, like those in the CCC, who were relegated to the home feeling dissatisfied and lacking intellectual stimulation and adult companionship; when they got together in 1935, every member of the CCC agreed to write an article, using a nom de plume, mail it to the editor, who would compile all of the contributions and hand-stitch them together in a decorative linen cover.

There was only one copy of each edition of the magazine. The editor would mail the completed magazine to the first woman on a pre-arranged list, who had a set amount of time to read it and to respond to the articles by commenting directly on the pages; that member would forward it on to the next woman, so on, until every person had received the magazine. The same group of women did this twice a month for 54 years until only seven of the women were still writing. Throughout this entire time, the women fiercely upheld the rule that the magazine would be written for, read by, the members of the club; the one commonality amongst the women in the CCC was. Other than that, they were a diverse group of women. In fact, diversity was a requirement for new members to the club because the magazine was intended to be a place to discuss and debate, the women wanted members who would be able to challenge one another and teach each other about different lifestyles and ideas; the club therefore consisted of soldiers’ wives and conscientious objectors’ wives, liberals and communists, women of different faiths and educational backgrounds.

The women ranged across the middle class, with some of the women coming from working-class families and at least one member whose family considered themselves a part of the aristocracy. As a further example of how keen they were to bring in different types of women, in 1938, after some women in the group made anti-Semitic remarks, they recruited a Jewish woman to join the club; every woman in the CCC chose a pen name. These names did not hide the women’s identities because they all had to know each other’s real names in order to send the magazine along in the post. However, it was a way for the women to represent themselves in the magazine. Elektra, for example, chose her pen name because she “was madly in love with her father.” Cotton Goods chose her pseudonym because she was from Lancashire and all of her family was in the cotton industry. The CCC included the writer Elaine Morgan. Bailey, Jenna. Can any mother help me? London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0571233137 Mass Observation Archive. Jenna Bailey Website about Can Any Mother Help Me?

The story of the CCC. National Women's Register for Modern Day examples of correspondence magazines. Phoenix Correspondence Club is a direct descendant of CCC which welcomes new members