Sex

Somewhere, there must be a PhD: Flashing: Exhibitionistic Disorder in the Oeuvre of Alan Bennett. It’s there in the first of his Talking Heads monologues (‘He’s been had up for exposing himself in Sainsbury’s doorway – as mother said, Tesco, you could understand it’) and in the last, Waiting for the Telegram, which opened with Thora Hird, one-time presenter of Songs of Praise, saying: ‘I saw this feller’s what-do-you-call-it today.’ It takes three pages for a what-do-you-call-it to appear in Killing Time, Bennett’s new novella, which is set in Hill Topp House old people’s home. Mr Woodruff, a resident, is indefatigable, his self-exposure a running motif as ‘not for the

Jilly Cooper, queen of the British bonkbuster, has turned her attention to football for her 18th novel. She was inspired after sitting next to Sir Alex Ferguson at lunch one day. She also thanks Kenny Dalglish, Alan Curbishley and ‘my wonderful neighbour’ Tony Adams in her acknowledgements. Her friend, the former home secretary Michael Howard, even took her to a Liverpool match, where she met Steven Gerrard.  Her legions of fans need not worry, however. We are still in Rutshire, the village Cooper created for her earlier novels; Rupert Campbell-Black, the hero of Riders, Rivals and Mount!, who was allegedly partly modelled on Andrew Parker Bowles, still lives in Penscombe

New books by, articles about or Sasquatch-like sightings of J.M. Coetzee routinely send me back to that infamous YouTube clip of Geoff Dyer face-planting while being introduced by Coetzee at the Adelaide Book Festival – an episode often cited as evidence that the Nobel Laureate has no sense of humour. The garlanded ex-South African’s work is famously as dry as the Karoo, and Coetzee himself has been accused of having only ever laughed once. But a smile is visible in ‘The Pole’, the longest story in this collection. Beatriz, in her late forties, is an educated Spanish woman, ‘a good person’ in a ‘civilised’ (read dormant) marriage, involved in organising

Some time ago I was a guest at a book festival in France where we were invited to dinner in the town hall with local dignitaries. I was asked if I liked asparagus. I do, I said, thinking of delicious green spears. Good, said the woman in charge, as it was the asparagus season. I was then presented with an enormous plate of leek-sized white asparagus with a tiny dab of hollandaise on the side, and then expected to eat my way through essentially a fibrous albino python as the dignitaries looked on expectantly. It was a long evening. I mention this because that’s basically what the experience of reading

It is often said that the age of letter-writing is past. This forecast seems to me premature. I have edited three volumes of letters, in each case by writers labelled (though not by me) as ‘the last of their kind’. Yet here is another one, and I feel confident that more will follow. Few now write letters, but those who still do tend to take care what they write. And it will be some decades before we have used up the legacy of the living. John le Carré, who died almost two years ago at the age of 89, was one such. His work is likely to be reassessed over

The problem for feminism is men. Not, specifically, in the sense that men are the source of women’s problems, although the statistics do tend to point in that direction. Feminism’s men problem is that, despite all this, women like men. Love men. One of the lessons of second-wave experiments in separatism is that the idealised man-free existence is always fighting against the gravity of affection. Sandra Newman’s novel The Men takes that quandary and does something clever with it. She imagines a world in which all the men and all the boys and all the trans women and all the male non-binaries and all the Y-chromosome-carrying foetuses are mysteriously spirited

Writing from a child’s point of view is a daredevil act that Miriam Toews raises the stakes on in her latest novel. The nine-year-old narrator is meant to have written the words that appear on the page. But then there is something inherently risky about Toews’s whole undertaking as a novelist. She has made her name in fiction that grapples with the restrictive Mennonite community in which she was raised – keeping faith with it and betraying it simultaneously. Her masterly Women Talking confronted the community head on, depicting the secret meetings of a group of women deciding how to respond to pervasive sexual violence. Now we move outside the