Revenge is so much more satisfying than regret.

The legacy of women's war work is our present post-industrial employment structure. It was the war that created the demand for a technologically advanced, de-skilled, low-paid, non-unionized female workforce and paved the way for making part-time work the norm for married women now. A generation later, it was the daughters of wartime women workers who completed their mothers' campaign for equal pay.

Revenge is so much more satisfying than regret.

A new dress. Is this all it takes to make a new beginning, this shred of dyed cloth, shaped into the form of a woman's body?

There is probably no finer prose writer alive in Britain now, no-one better at making a sentence, no-one better at descriptive writing, no-one who can get so close to the vividness of other peoples interior selves.

When I was 20 I was immensely proud of the rows of grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics in my bookcase.

Many of us, whether in the jungles of Asia or on the streets of Chicago, had discovered that noble causes can lead to ignoble actions and that we were capable of sacrificing honor to a sense of efficacy.