Sins against theology and haberdashery
From the time I was a little girl, long before I knew I wanted to be a writer, I had three ambitions which I felt that I must achieve in order fully to realise my potential as an adult. And they were:...
View ArticleYouth, I do adore thee
At the risk of being vulgar, I can’t help thinking that Dr Greer’s (‘At least she’s got an “ology!”’, I always say in her defence, when callow acquaintances mock her) attitude to matters sexual goes up...
View ArticleThe Fran and Jay show
When I married Tony Parsons in the late 1970s, he immediately took me to live in a town called Billericay in Essex — his ‘calf country’, I suppose, in a Spam sort of way. To say it was a one-horse town...
View ArticleSob sisters and scolders
Without meaning to come the Big I-Am, I’ve got issues with the whole premise of this book, which probably stem from my very healthy level of self-esteem. I mean, once we’re out of our teens (when...
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‘A screaming, grievance-hawking shambles’
Julie Burchill vs Paris Lees http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_February_2014_v4.mp3 DownloadiTunesRSS In the early 1970s, my dad was a singular sort of feminist. As well as working...
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The joy of being hated
Listen http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_February_2014_v4.mp3 On Saturday morning, when the body of the beautiful Antipodean model and television personality Charlotte Dawson was...
View ArticleThe joy of less sex
From the age of 13, when the hormones kicked in, till I left my parents home at the age of 17 to become a writer (nearly forty years later, I’m still waiting) I must have been the most sex-mad virgin...
View ArticleDon’t do as I do, do as I say
A-Huff’s career has been remarkable for the contrast between hard-headed social advancement (‘the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus’) and addle-pated spiritual questing. In this she resembles an...
View ArticleI’m sick of weak women being praised as ‘strong’
When I heard that the television pundit and all-round nepot Kelly Osbourne had gone into ‘food rehab’ upon gaining weight, I fair choked on my cronut. Crumbs! Is there any pleasure, weakness or habit...
View ArticleFor God’s sake
For the past decade, I have lived — literally — between a church and a synagogue; as metaphors go, I would get laughed out of town if I stuck it in a novel. I left my church (not the one next door)...
View Article… and beefing up a living one
I’ve always said that speech is my second language, so naturally I’m somewhat slang-shy; I love words all written down properly and punctuated to within an inch of their lives. Not so Jonathon Green,...
View ArticleMockers and moaners
Books by bellicose columnists with the initials R.L. are like buses — none comes along for ages, then two come at once. Having been given the heave ho from my last column some years back, I was looking...
View ArticleLetter from Tel Aviv
‘There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor/ I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm/ Gonna be a twister to blow everything down/ That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground!’...
View ArticleHow to write a novel
At a time when feminism is grimly engaged in disappearing up its own intersection (two transsexuals squabbling over a tampon is the image that comes to mind) Caitlin Moran is to be bravo’d till the...
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Born to be famous
Recently one morning, as I was weeping over Caitlin Moran’s (daughter of Mr and Mrs Moran of Wolverhampton) brilliant book How to Build a Girl — specifically, the heartbreaking way she writes about...
View ArticleWhen did romantic love become a religion?
Listen http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_21_August_2014_v4.mp3 Pity the modern starlet. Be she steaming-hot pop-tart or reality-show show-off, her range of emotional experiences will,...
View ArticleA slap in the Facebook
In the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM (‘More stars than there are in the heavens’) was rumoured to have had a very strange chart on his wall. This graph, allegedly,...
View ArticlePortmeirion
My husband and I stay for a week most summers in Portmeirion, the strangest and loveliest ‘village’ in the world. Built amid 20 miles of woodland on the peninsula of Tremadog Bay in Wales, it was...
View ArticleThe hate that dare not speak its name
Watching the recent footage of Islamic State gang members haggling over the price of captured Christian women in a makeshift slave market — one of them wants a 15-year-old with green eyes, another...
View ArticleBound and caged, but fighting-fit
It’s always interesting when people succeed in two different arenas — like Mike Nesmith’s mum, who gave the world both a Monkee and Tippex, or Hedy Lamarr, the beautiful film star who also helped...
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