I've got more friends than I've ever had in my life at the age of 39 - although given that I didn't have any friends until the age of 27, it doesn't say much - because I found the internet.

As a former ballerina, I can't put down Maggie Shipstead's new book, Astonish Me.

I was brought up in a kind of, you know, very hippie, liberal family. And it was just always automatically assumed that men and women were equal and indeed superior.

I am pathetically law-abiding.

And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.

The problem with battling yourself is that even if you win, you lose.

What art should be about,' they will say, 'is revealing exquisite and resonant truths about the human condition.' Well, to be honest - no, it shouldn’t. I mean, it can occasionally, if it wants to; but really, how many penetrating insights to human nature do you need in one lifetime? Two? Three? Once you’ve realised that no one else has a clue what they’re doing, either, and that love can be totally pointless, any further insights into human nature just start getting depressing really.