Jenny Diski

Until recently nothing about my experience of knitting or anything I had noticed about it suggested that it might become a cultural ‘thing’. Certainly no sign that I would ever find it a daily itch. The history of my failure in the handicrafts began early. I really looked forward, in my single-figured life, to mixing the paste to pour into the rubber moulds that made plaster of...

Was there ever a time when clothes were worn purely for warmth? La Mécanique des dessous, the book of the exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (until 24 November) begins its investigation into underthings in the 14th century. You have to start somewhere and the actual beginning is too difficult: speculative, lacking the beautiful, horrific, enticing objects...

I have to acknowledge a misunderstanding. Only when I got her book did I realise that Liz Jones is not Samantha Brick. Scandalised Twitter links melded them together in my lazy mind as the same person in spite of the huge clue that one was called Liz Jones and the other Samantha Brick. The mind has mountains and makes molehills. I was led to an article in the Mail by Samantha Brick over a year ago. The piece told in notably style-free prose how Brick’s exceptional beauty had been the cause of injustice and suffering in all the important aspects of her life.

There’s a joke going round on Twitter that ‘they are arresting the Seventies.’ The ‘Seventies’ they are arresting is the decade rather than the mean age of those being rounded up by Operation Yewtree, though 73-year-old Jimmy Tarbuck is the latest entertainer from the period known to have been questioned about historical sex abuse allegations. Max Clifford,...