Sex for many has become a sorry business, a mechanical release involving neither discovery nor triumph, stressing human isolation more dishearte-ingly than ever before.

The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.

There are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men.

The consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over.

The high-heeled shoe is a marvellously contradictory item; it brings a woman to a man's height but makes sure she cannot keep up with him.

As soon as we find ourselves working at being indispensable, rigging up a pattern of vulnerability in our loved ones, we know that our love has taken the socially sanctioned form of egotism.

Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.