Lidija Haas

At the height of the ‘warrantless wiretapping’ scandal of 2006 – George W. Bush had authorised the National Security Agency to monitor overseas phone calls involving suspected al-Qaida operatives, but it transpired that the surveillance extended to all electronic communication and web activity, foreign and domestic – Sherry Turkle went to a party celebrating the Webby...

When I complained to my mother that I’d run out of Jane Austen novels, she handed me one by Georgette Heyer. ‘It isn’t quite the same,’ she said, and even then – I was 10 – I could see that it was and it wasn’t. The romantic interest and sharp dialogue were similar, though not so nuanced; the supporting cast of aunts and neighbours comic, but not so...

Lena Dunham’s Girls opens on its creator and star eating the way you don’t often see a woman eat on TV: brow furrowed, cheeks full, spaghetti cascading towards the plate, left hand free to catch any strands that might not quite fit in her mouth. Dunham’s character, 24-year-old Hannah Horvath, is having a meal in a restaurant with her parents, but there’s something of...

‘He’s my enemy,’ Jane Auer recalled telling a friend when she first met Paul Bowles. But she immediately followed him to Mexico even so and, though she had been and would always be much more drawn to women, married him less than a year later. The instinct to court an ‘enemy’ rather than an admirer may have been a shrewd one: it seems to have been especially...

Fairy tales​ deal in ones, twos and threes, in lone heroines, haunting doubles, sets of wishes and curses: they are patternings, engines for producing extreme and ambiguous effects from simple elements. The title of Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel comes from the storybookish names of its three principal women, Boy, Snow and Bird – ‘a wicked stepmother and her daughters’,...