Honour Killing
Simply by opening the question, widening the gap between potentiality and history, between the inner message of a faith and a religion in the vice of political power, or more simply between a text and its interpretation, you make it impossible to lay the worst – and honour killing has a fair claim to be described as the worst – at Islam’s door. Such forms of questioning, at which of course feminism excels, have always been the strongest riposte to the brute conviction of any power or law. More
Hypochondria
Adopting for a moment the familiar, modern and derogatory meaning of the word, Brian Dillon consoles us that ‘hypochondriacs are almost always other people.’ The condition exists on a continuum, with fraud at one end, delusion in the middle and medical incompetence at the other end; he is a benefits cheat, you are a hypochondriac, I am as yet undiagnosed. More
Maupassant
Maupassant is often called ‘a natural storyteller’: that’s to say, a professional, practised, unnatural storyteller. Such is invariably the case, with both the paid and the unpaid variety (think of the best anecdotalists you know in life: their effect of spontaneity is always based on adjustable tropes, prepared impromptus and trusty set-pieces). More
Rape-Rape
What is it like to be 13, a wannabe movie star, in the presence of a powerful movie director in the house of a famous movie star, being given a powerful drug and alcohol and then invited to give the great man a blow job or make yourself available for cunnilingus? I was neither dazzled nor drugged into sex when I was 14 – I was embarrassed into it. More
