Natasha Walter
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/ 26 October 2005

Punished by biology

There is always bad news for women, but rarely so bad as in the past few weeks. If you ever dreamed that in the modern world you could avail yourself of freedoms unknown to women in previous generations, the warnings are now being posted on every door. You meddle with nature at your peril, girl.

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/ 6 September 2005

Singing from the same hymn sheet

Alastair Kirk stopped going to school when he was 11. He is now 20, and not exactly a dropout — he went on being educated at home, sitting down every day to work through booklets of maths, english, science, history, geography, all couched in a unique style. ”Here are examples of interrogative sentences,” states one booklet in the curriculum he used, Accelerated Christian Education.

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/ 18 July 2005

Is Harry playing God?

The secret of Harry Potter’s success lies in the continuing allure of magic and fantasy in a secular society. Gorgeous as all these playful encounters between angels and witches, shamans and talking animals clearly are, the heavy hand of prophecy always drives the most popular of these recent fantasy worlds.

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/ 21 January 2004

Love and the marketplace

Over the past decade, a raft of self-help books has promised to furnish women with the ultimate means by which they can find happiness in their relationships. From the supposed modern classic The Rules to last year’s Sex and the Married Girl, these books are most notable for what they don’t talk about — love.

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/ 29 September 2003

The struggle for suffrage in Kuwait

On October 10 it will be 100 years since Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, determined to win the battle for the vote. Just 15 years later, British women had the suffrage for which they had shouted and sung and starved and marched. But there is one country left where women are still engaged in that struggle.