In Cusk’s headline-grabbing latest, a writer invents the biography of a film star who sounds very like Natalie Portman. Set in the now standard late-Cusk sans serif typeface (no frivolous flourishes!), Life of M serves... Read more »
We can all agree that the internet today, especially two particular platforms owned by the world’s greatest megalomaniacs, is a hellscape. But if you think X and Facebook are purgatories of friendless... Read more »
According to the evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams, almost everyone gets sex wrong. Traditionalists tend to exaggerate the natural differences between men and women. Progressives tend to minimise them, and to assume that... Read more »
The Bafta-winning actor Katherine Parkinson has lauded the television series Rivals for its “radical” depiction of sex from a woman’s perspective. Speaking at a preview screening in Bristol, where much of the... Read more »
‘The Charli xcx music evoked the spirit of the book’ My group of six English teachers – aged from 30 to 54 – saw the film on Friday. We are still processing... Read more »
The latest collection by the poet Hollie McNish is dedicated to anyone who has been “blamed, shamed, pressured, tortured, dehumanised, de-mothered over a man-made concept about your own body”. Virgin is a... Read more »
10 Duffy (1980) Duffy is the first in a series of crime novels about a bisexual private eye that Barnes published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. It came out the same year... Read more »
A “once in a century” discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and... Read more »
When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden’s brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women’s prize for fiction last month, they weren’t just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy... Read more »