“... or lack of effects – of their efforts. What they do remember, and remind the reader of, is that Germaine Greer went to dinner without her knickers on, and that Marianne Faithful and the Rolling Stones did something ‘supposedly depraved’ with a Mars Bar. It may be that the major quest of many women in the Sixties, like this book’s ...”

“... He therefore inserts a few down-to-earth subject-headings like Breasts and Buttocks (which gives Germaine Greer her chance), Homosexuality and even Subways and Ziegfeld Follies. Unfortunately, it is when he feels the need to unbend and put on his Playboy hat that Mr Murphy lets us down: he seems unable to recognise contemporary dross when he sees it (a ...”

“... We are given the necessary information about the likes of Hockney, Ted Hughes, John Berger, Germaine Greer and Noam Chomsky. Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (‘a logical enough outcome’) are briskly explained, Barthes, Lacan and Derrida rush by, Foucault and Althüsser get a rather breathless mention as part of the ‘post-modern ...”

“... first issue of Spare Rib. Rosie is now 21 and still impressed by names. She is ‘staggered when Germaine Greer arrives uninvited to her party’. ‘Uninvited’, she hastens to add, because she had been ‘too nervous to ask her’. She is less impressed by the older ‘hangers-on of the youth movement’: ‘their hair was shorter, their jeans were ...”

“... columnist on the Thunderer, and now she was the only feminist Britain could offer, given that Germaine Greer was in her rainforest years. (Greer anointed Moran in the Times, calling her ‘a genuinely original talent’.) Moran was first again, this time to sense that mainstream feminism was amassing once more: How ...”

“... hardly acknowledges this material. She includes an (uncharacteristically opaque) one-liner from Germaine Greer, and a paragraph or two from Betty Friedan and Shulamith Firestone. And there is a nicely observed commentary on the domestic politics of child-rearing by Nora Ephron (‘Now it takes two parents to take the child to the doctor – one to do ...”

“... instrument with his teeth. The kids loved it and they called for more and more explicit scenes; as Germaine Greer wrote in 1970, ‘they wanted him to give head to the guitar and rub it over his cock. They didn’t want to hear him play.’ Like Jagger, Hendrix appealed to a public which could never quite generate a credible symbol in its quest for sexual ...”

“... often sounds unconvincing. The slang seems neither Russian, nor English, nor American: as Germaine Greer said of the Australian accents in Neighbours, ‘they seem to be cut from the same ...”

“... and without warning, a woman who looked like a bedraggled, tired prostitute’ – Germaine Greer, as it turns out. Within six months, Wyatt had shown some of the entries to a publisher, ‘to know whether he thought it was worth going on writing it’. The latter’s favourable response – ‘marvellous’, ‘outrageous’ – reassured ...”

“... the earlier pages – popping his biceps and washing under his armpits in a vain attempt to lure Germaine Greer into bed – is suddenly transformed into an artist gravely contemplating his oeuvre, cherry blossom and death. Inside the fat Australian, we discover, there is a slim beautiful Japanese poet struggling to get out: Now [i.e. 1990] I can hear ...”

“... and to prettiness has also made her a problematic figure for feminist art historians, although Germaine Greer made a spirited case for her in The Obstacle Race. Angelica Goodden’s biographical account makes little attempt to elaborate critically on what has been said already about the art, or to suggest that it has any greater depth than has ...”

“... which shows to the fullest extent the part played by wit in the business of effective reappraisal. Germaine Greer, too, in her first book, had enormous fun with the niceties prescribed for girls and purveyed in the pages of romantic fiction. These, and other timely studies like Eva Figes’s Patriarchal Attitudes, set out to demonstrate the insecure basis ...”

“... of Madonna and (in death) Princess Diana, with other bits added on (a sting in the tail from Germaine Greer); Ormus has a dead twin brother who sings Western hits into his ear long before they burst on the rest of the world – but Ormus can never quite make out the words. When he first hears ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, which he’s been humming for ...”

“... archetype which has as much to do with Freud and Breuer as with the brave new woman fashioned by Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan: yet the liberated woman of today must still contend with it, and measure her success in terms of her ability to do so. The Golden Notebook was written at a time when women were beginning to have ambitions for ...”

“... notice some strange inclusions: for example, essays on David Frost, Kenneth Clark, Tom Wolfe and Germaine Greer – Sixties figures to a man. Booker’s earlier book, The Neophiliacs, he tells us, was ‘a detailed, analytical account of the astonishing changes which had come over Britain in the Fifties and Sixties’. This time he has bigger fish to ...”