Artful lessons in power dressing
Evening Standard: Feb 18 2010 Godolphin and Latymer School for Girls in Hammersmith, hosting its first Arts Festival next week, has men talking for three out of four evenings Andrew Marr, Chris Patten...
View ArticleWhich book? Blogs aren’t book reviews
Deciding what to write about for my first Blog has occupied rather too much of my time for something that is meant to be spontaneous. I assume it will be about a book – what else since I am lucky...
View ArticleWalking Between the Raindrops
The most important moments happen in kitchens, says David Grossman the Israeli novelist in London briefly this week explaining why he wanted a mother as the main protagonist of his new book. I needed...
View ArticleAmazing mother fighting for justice
I interviewed Sheila Blanco for The Times last month. She is an extraordinarily brave and courageous woman, absolutely determined to get Justice for her son Mark, who was 30 when he died in mysterious...
View ArticleWimmin’s Work
I have just been to see Made in Dagenham. It’s a film about 187 women machinists who went on strike at the Ford Motor Company in 1968 initially when their work was down graded from skilled. Slowly the...
View ArticleCat’s Paws at Work again
I finally caught up with the justly praised centenary exhibition devoted to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes at the Victoria and Albert Museum and drooled over the fabulous costumes remarkably...
View ArticleDon’t blame the women
Reading about the horrific sexual attack on war reporter Lara Logan gives me a certain sense of deja vue. In 1972 – almost 40 years ago – I was interviewed for a job as a foreign correspondent at...
View ArticleNew Zealand Women
In 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote. After two decades of campaigning by women such as the Liverpool-born Kate Sheppard, who was also a temperance...
View ArticleOf Books and Babies
I am in the happy position of seeing a book that I wrote twenty years ago republished this month. Most excitingly, the book has been reviewed – a great surprise in these days of such tight space for...
View ArticleUrgent: Message to Girls Leaving School. Find your inner rod of steel
Recently I gave a talk to almost 800 people girls, staff, pupils and parents at St Marys Calne, the Wiltshire Girls School celebrating its 140th birthday this year with a new, dynamic American...
View ArticleThe Pram in the Hall – Enid Bagnold Writer and Mother
A talk I gave recently at the October Gallery – The annual Persephone Lecture I have never thought it a particular advantage to know the person you are writing about. You will have known them at a...
View ArticleA Dying Breed
Its been a dreadful week for deaths. It always is, I know. But recently, I darent open the obits page for fear Ill meet someone I know or someone I was hoping to interview but left it too late....
View ArticlePrison and Fashion – an unlikely link?
As I start to write segments of my book on Paris in wartime (and beyond) its hard to get prisons out of my mind especially Nazi ones. On Monday I interviewed the surviving daughter of a French...
View ArticleThe Verdict of History – Cherchez La Femme
Winston Churchill died on January 24, 1965, fifty years ago next month. Extraordinarily, it was exactly the same date as his fathers death in 1895 and one that Winston himself had predicted for his...
View ArticleWomen of Unimaginable Courage
I dont often get a chance to practise curtseying, a skill I learned at ballet school before I hit double figures. But today I had the pleasure of doing a minimalist bob at the same time as I shook...
View ArticleAre you what you wear?
Luckily the days have long since passed when caring about fashion denoted an airhead. Men and women can now be openly interested in clothes and style and still be considered to have an active brain....
View ArticleTen things I learned while writing Les Parisiennes
1. There is always a choice in life. Choice is inside our heads. How do we think even if choice appears to have been taken away, how do we act? Women in Paris faced an extreme: would I have walked out...
View ArticleThe Questions People Ask
After giving several talks about Les Parisiennes and speaking to reading groups about the choices facing women in Occupied Paris, I now realise what the number one question from the audience is: what...
View ArticleWomen in Public Places
Walking around London these days it’s hard not to be struck by the number of large, often life-sized bronzes in public places. In a selfie obsessed generation, tourists can often be seen posing on the...
View ArticlePutting myself in the interview chair
This weekend, instead of me questioning other people, two interviews about me appeared, one in print and one on the radio. I already knew, of course, how tricky it is, when you are under pressure, to...
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