The introduction to Alone! Alone! is very good. It’s modest and candid, and everything Rosemary Din- nage says about book-reviewing is spot on (e.g. ‘If it’s about misery, send it to Dinnage’ — funny, I thought that was me.) Especially this: ‘It’s sometimes like writing a diary, or a running commentary of evolving ideas.’ That’s exactly how it feels, if you review a lot — and not even very rapidly evolving ideas, in my case; my current obsessions probably repeat themselves in every review. Hence Dinnage’s idea for this book: to collect those of her reviews that hung together as a ‘running commentary’ on one of her favourite miseries, ‘outsider women’: women who, by choice or nature, ‘stood outside the boundaries of the ordinary’, and, as her title proclaims, alone.

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