Society

‘Never give up your career for a man.’ These words of my mother’s rang in my ears throughout girlhood, adolescence and young womanhood, until, about a decade into my marriage, she finally accepted I wasn’t going to. The very opposite of an Austen-esque Mrs Bennet, desperate to engineer a good marriage for her daughter, my mother’s belief was that any woman in possession of a brain must be in want of a job. A room of one’s own? Certainly. And a bank account, a pension and some shares. Although I have on occasion mused about how lovely it must be to be supported by a doting husband, my mother, as

I have a bone to pick with Camilla Long – a colleague of mine at the Sunday Times, where she is the film reviewer. She gave five stars to a stop-motion animation film called Anomalisa a year or so back and I went to see it on her journalistic recommendation. Oh, and also cos it had Jennifer Jason Leigh voicing one part, the most underrated actress of the last thirty years. It was godawful; pretentious, badly scripted, shallow and dull. I thought about suing Camilla for liking a film I had not liked and thus making me endure two hours of misery. Or maybe outing her as a racist. Why?

Lloyds Banking Group has set aside a further £475 million for misconduct costs as the bank’s statutory profits more than doubled to £4.2 billion. The Times reports on results that Lloyds called a ‘good overall performance’. Its profits are the highest for a decade and shares in the bank rose by 4 per cent after the announcement. The bank, in which taxpayers own a stake of just under 5 per cent, also unveiled an 11 per cent rise in total dividends to £2.2 billion and the same percentage increase in staff bonuses to £393 million. Underlying profits fell from £8.1 billion to £7.9 billion. Investment After a sustained period of record

On Sunday, Coffee House ran an article by Koos Couvee, a former Enfield Advertiser journalist and contemporary of mine. It argued that knife crime will only be reduced if we legalise drugs. Young people are killing each other in turf wars over the supply of drugs with an array of horrific knives and even machetes. Couvee suggests that the violence would be reduced if drugs were legalised. His argument is an economic one: joining a gang and dealing drugs is more lucrative than getting a job. So if you legalise drugs, the problem goes away. But if drugs are legalised, other equally nasty sources of revenue will kick in. What

Among the baby photos and moans about the weather cluttering up my timeline the other day, a Facebook post by my friend Elaine caught my eye. She’d been trying to buy tickets for a Jamiroquai gig at The Roundhouse in London on 31 March. Armed with one old-fashioned telephone and three devices, she’d been desperately dialling and refreshing web pages since the moment the tickets went on sale. But the tickets sold out in minutes and she wasn’t one of the lucky ones. My first thought was ‘why am I friends with people with such terrible taste in music?’ My second was ‘I bet the tickets are already for sale

Let me state the obvious for a moment: the Church of England does not know what line to take on homosexuality. The traditional line, that it is contrary to God’s will, is opposed by most Anglicans. The clergy in General Synod showed their opposition last week by refusing to approve a report by the bishops that upheld the old line. But the minority that likes the traditional teaching is not for budging. Does the leadership have the stomach to pursue a reform that will create a schism? No. Is a compromise possible? In theory, the Church could drop the ban on gay clergy and the ban on the blessing of gay