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“... Something amazing has happened to Toni Morrison’s reputation in the United States. Over the last ten years, since the publication of Beloved, her fifth novel, she has been catapulted from the teeming ranks of well-known, well-respected fiction writers, to the thin-aired plane reserved for America’s deities and seers. Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 had something to do with this of course, but Morrison’s status in American culture goes beyond, and is certainly not reducible to, the approbation of the Swedes ...”

“... Not long ago, James Wolcott wrote an article for the New Yorker lamenting the ‘softened, juvenilised’, timbre of modern female journalism. In the old days, he said, women like Germaine Greer and Valerie Solanas made men nervous. They produced feisty, aggressive prose. They were rude and polemical. They wrote, in Norman Mailer’s words, like ‘very tough faggots ...”

“... here, testify to the fitful phenomenon that was Tynan’s generosity. His comments to Joseph Heller, after reading the proof copy of Good as Gold, or his pointers to Marlene Dietrich on how to write her autobiography, are rare and touching exercises in gentle criticism. ‘AVOID PRINTING WORDS IN CAPITAL LETTERS,’ he advises Dietrich. Tynan was perhaps ...”

“... Claire Bloom has now written two books about her life. Lest this give rise to any suspicion of autobiographical surfeit, she notes in the Preface to the latest volume, that her earlier book, Lime-light and After, constituted merely ‘a modest account’ of her acting career, whereas the new work presents a more thoughtful self-portrait of Bloom, the female ...”

“... In 1972, Vivienne Westwood, a 31-year-old mother of two, sat down at the kitchen table of her council flat in Clapham and began decorating white T-shirts to sell at Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, the shop at 430 King’s Road owned and run by her boyfriend, Malcolm McLaren. Westwood’s previous T-shirts, which bore screenprint images of rock’n’roll idols and slogans like ‘Vive la Rock’, had not sold well ...”

“... Fourteen years ago, Edmund Morris won the job of writing the official Reagan biography. With the job came all kinds of unprecedented access. Morris was allowed to attend senior staff meetings at the White House and to travel as part of the Presidential entourage on foreign trips. He had permission to examine the President’s conscientiously kept handwritten diary and, most promisingly, he was granted a monthly private interview with his subject ...”

“... If anyone knows about the allure of hair it’s little girls. Between the ages of seven and twelve, girls groom their Barbies and each other with an intensity bordering on the freakish. At least they did in my day. Among the females in my class at primary school, hair-styling, or, more accurately, hair-fondling, was far and away the playground pursuit of choice ...”

“... The reputation​ of parenthood has not fared well in the modern era. Social science has concluded that parents are either no happier than people without children, or decidedly unhappier. Parents themselves have grown competitively garrulous on the subject of their dissatisfactions. Confessions of child-rearing misery are by now so unremarkable that the parent who doesn’t merrily cop to the odd infanticidal urge is considered a rather suspect figure ...”

“... As a siren Wallis Windsor had been a figure who had changed historical events more drastically than any other woman in human history.’ If one could only believe that the Duchess of Windsor had changed historical events more drastically than Mary Queen of Scots, or Joan of Arc, or even Margaret Thatcher, then perhaps Caroline Blackwood’s recycled revelations about the Duchess – her expertise at fellatio, her 22 carat gold bath-tub at Cap d’Antibes, the amusing tricks that her homosexual lover, the Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue, liked to perform with his penis at dinner parties – might seem quite, you know, important ...”

“... J.D. Salinger, who is now in his early eighties, has spent the greater part of his life hiding out from the world on a hilltop in New Hampshire. Over the last half century, he has continued to write steadily, it seems, but to protect his reclusion he has refused to publish any of his work since 1968. Then – at the last minute, as it were – a former girlfriend, Joyce Maynard, a woman with whom Salinger had a nine-month relationship twenty-five years ago, decided to write a memoir of their affair – a memoir in which she details, among other things, his domestic, sexual and dietary quirks ...”

“... I have none of these things. It’s odd.’ When she appeared on Start the Week recently, Zoë Heller described Willy as typical of a certain kind of ‘older but strangely attractive man’. While it’s true that he’s an interesting, complicated character, witty and disaffected, veering erratically between arrogance and acute ...”

“... get most space is generally decided early on, often for reasons that are at first unclear. In Zoë Heller’s new novel, The Believers, a large number of characters are briskly and satirically drawn, and most are given lines of dialogue that reveal something of the way they see themselves. Among them are four women (and a man who disappears ...”

“... how self-serving Bloom’s account was, how strewn with simpering pieties and luvvie banalities (Zoë Heller in these pages referred to its ‘princessy tone’), but for those who believed Roth’s fiction reflected the leerings and sneerings of a spoiled temperamentalist, here was first-hand non-fiction confirmation.Roth resorted to novelistic ...”