"Not all heroines wear capes: this one wears stripper shoes, her own brand of perfume, and an aura of such buoyant fearlessness she’s like a pornified Joan of Arc."

"Can’t get affordable housing? Blame Mohammad from Afghanistan, not the fact that the only housing regularly being built is luxury apartments for the rich."

The beach read should be like the beach body – it’s whatever you personally bring to the beach.

The album’s release has been reported on the grown-up news. Even The Economist has been getting involved, asking bravely – some might say recklessly - if Taylor Swift “has peaked”

"The thing about Amy Winehouse is that she was very funny and very clever. This razor-sharp irreverence does not come across in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s beautiful film about her..."

"He would have been seven when they decriminalised gayness, 10 when they closed the last Magdalen laundry, and 11 when they allowed miserable couples to legally split; he would have grown up in a very different, rapidly changing Ireland, an Ireland that was psychologically decolonising at warp speed."

Imagine if the Elon Musks and Donald Trumps of the world began urging their followers to plant a tree or grow some veg.

"Where once you threw yourself around in a mangle of elbows, or at least stood at the back bobbing along to the band, today’s gigs have become a prime source of that midlife regenerative rage."

No hinting, no lingering... just a short sharp quit, accompanied by a sentence so refreshing it rivals rolling around naked in fresh snow: “I am not the best person for the job anymore”

"There is no mention of Lise Meitner, the physicist who discovered nuclear fission in 1939; without her, there’d have been no Manhattan Project. Instead we have the alcoholic wife and the suicidal lover."