The BBC was warned by two whistleblowers that a British true crime author was claiming to have obtained the missing clothes of a child murder victim that the broadcaster had lost. The... Read more »
If you’re a regular reader of historical fiction, chances are you own at least a few books with images on their jackets of female-coded figures whose faces are obscured in some way.... Read more »
Good morning. It was a hare or maybe a small deer that prompted my own excursion into romantasy fiction. Stuck on the train home from London to Glasgow, delayed by animals on... Read more »
Shahrnush Parsipur, the celebrated Iranian writer whose subversive works of feminist fiction saw her repeatedly imprisoned, has died aged 80. A pioneer of women’s literature in Iran, Parsipur excoriated the country’s patriarchal... 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 »
In the spring of 2024, I am finally able to visit Banishanta, the island in southern Bangladesh that has been haunting my dreams. When I arrive I find it is little more than... Read more »
As I write this, Iranians around the world are holding their breath for the end of the murderous Islamic Republic. More than three years after the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement began, amid renewed... Read more »
When Sunwoo and Hana met on Twitter, they were in their 40s and committed bachelorettes. Both raised by the sea in Busan, they studied in Seoul before entering the city’s famously brutal rat... Read more »
After Elizabeth Bennet walked 3 miles across fields to visit her sick sister, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice came in for scandalised criticism of her “blowsy” hair and petticoats “six inches... Read more »