If you stepped back three decades (almost) to summer 1998, you’d find ‘a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind’. The President was, of course, Bill Clinton, and the detail emerging about his sexual shenanigans with twenty-two-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinski, a women less than half his age, was sending America into an ‘ecstasy of … More The Human Stain by Philip Roth
When I was a little girl, my mum used to sing me to sleep at night, mostly with popular songs from the 1920s – 1940s. (I know a ridiculous number of songs by Cole Porter, Gene Autry and The Andrews Sisters for someone my age.) One bedtime favourite was ‘Ol’ Man River’ from the musical … More I Married A Communist by Philip Roth
A couple of months ago (at the time of writing) Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer made a speech about how Britain risks becoming an “island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together” due to uncontrolled immigration. He later said he deeply regretted his choice of words, but it got me thinking about the … More American Pastoral by Philip Roth
