“... should on no account now wish to have missed’. Varnhagen, Luxemburg and Arendt form Gillian Rose’s central trio of outsider women thinkers in The Broken Middle (1992), excluded from all clubs by ethnicity and gender, but who learned to use that exclusion as a ‘coign of vantage, in letters as in life’. ‘It was,’ as Arendt put it, ‘the ...”

“... is not me at all,’ Chelsea wrote ‘from behind bars’ in a letter intended for the novelist Gillian Slovo, but which the Evening Standard used as an occasion to run her big-hair camera-phone-in-the-mirror Facebook picture yet again. She began a two-year jail sentence this month. Here, in a nutshell, is the problem with feminism. Young women ‘of good ...”