There was a night as a boy when I couldn’t sleep ahead of a football match, too wired by thoughts of the sporting heroics I might achieve—or fall short of—the next day. While tossing and turning in my

Lola Young Eight Weeks Looking back, moving forwards, defying the odds 336pp. Penguin. Paperback, £10.99. Lola Young has been a crossbench member of the House of Lords since 2004. She is also an emeri

Were Julie and Cheryl about to begin new chapters in their lives?

WHEN Kate had decided, at the age of fifty-five, to reduce her working hours and go part-time at her job, she had imagined filling her extra days off with all kinds of exciting adventures. Instead, sh

“Where are we to begin?”, Virginia Woolf asks in her essay “How to Read a Book”. “How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasures from what we read?

In 1966, an essay far ahead of its time appeared in the pages of the New Left Review (NLR). “Women: The Longest Revolution” was an analysis of how women are produced as a class. Its author, Juliet Mit