The Origins of Sex by Faramerz Dabhoiwala
Germaine Greer takes issue with the claim that modern sex began in the late 17th centuryFaramerz Dabhoiwala, senior fellow in history at Exeter College, Oxford, recently exhorted people to read his new book, The Origins of Sex, because "it will almost ...
DH Lawrence has much the same view of women as Stephen Fry
All those people who have their hearts in the right place have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of the not guilty verdict in the trial of Penguin Books under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. The jury found the publisher not guilty because the...
Peter Carey? Doesn’t know his leeches. Tom McCarthy? Bad on moths
There was a time when anybody who submitted a text to a US publisher could expect to have it crawled over by an industrious fact-checker, who would question the writer's accuracy in every little detail. In the days before Google this was a demandi...
Germaine Greer: Reading rooms are an oasis
Reports that library services will be cut have been met with orchestrated outcry. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport softened us up for the bad news by revealing that the "proportion of adults visiting a library" had decreased from 48.2% to 39....
Paula Rego is the fourth woman artist to be made a dame. I wish she’d refused
A monarch who has never bought a work by a living artist has deigned to inflict on Paula Rego the patently ridiculous title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Since it was invented in 1917, the title has been bestowed on more than 70...
Cermaine Greer on the literary worth of old wives’ tales
'A foolish story, such as is told by garrulous old women' is how the Oxford dictionary defines an old wives' tale. Despite being treated with contempt over the centuries, these narratives served not only to amaze and appal children but to teach them coded lessons about the realities...
Lord Byron | Germaine Greer
Byron was first and foremost a poet. His output, in every conceivable metre, iambs and anapaests, blank verse, hudibrastics and heroic couplets, terzains, quatrains, sixains, rime royal, spenserians and ottava rima, was enormous. His last poem is written in Sapphics, one of the most difficult forms of all. That...
Farewell to poetry’s pal from Carol Ann Duffy, the nation’s students, and me | Germaine Greer