Why should women write like men?

Books or babies? It’s a choice that has presented itself to women writers for centuries. And it was a favourite theme of Ursula K. Le Guin who struggled, successfully, to balance the two. In her lecture, “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter”, published …

The horror of doppelgangers

A TV interviewer once asked an astronomer whether he thought there was life elsewhere in the universe. “Look,” replied the astronomer, “somewhere in the universe at this very moment, someone looking very much like you is asking that question of …

The impotence of the porn industry

Just north of the Strand, behind where the Australian High Commission now stands, there used to be what the press called “a fetid, miserable lane”. One of 19th-century London’s more disreputable districts, it housed the poor, the criminal, the prostitute …

Will Hollywood strike back?

In the Fifties, television destroyed radio, many of whose stars were themselves survivors of the death of vaudeville, and persisted through radio and into film: The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields. And many of the first movie stars had come first …