It is admirable that writers and filmmakers are not being held back from modern nightmares on grounds of taste or modesty, writes Natasha Walter.
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/ 26 October 2005
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
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.
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
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
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.
Hillary Rodham Clinton must have known that the attention given to her new book would centre not on her own development as a politician but on her relationship with her husband.