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“... their predecessors, disjointed and inconsequential. The thumbnail sketches of famous divas – Germaine Greer, Camille Paglia – are lively and shrewd, but Showalter’s personal reminiscences tend to be off-key, girlishly confiding and unrevealing at the same time. Obscure friends and acquaintances pop in and out with bare introductions, and the ...”

“... out), or fancy psychological theories (Erich Fromm out). Even feminism is too highbrow. Instead of Germaine Greer, there is Navratilova. When a poet does scrape in, like Robert Frost, all one needs to know is that he was famous, not why. Success matters more than states of the soul; the successsful are the pagan gods of ordinary life. The reader is judged ...”

“... early twenties and spent some time pursuing a doctorate at Cambridge on Shelley and Plato. When Germaine Greer appeared with him on the Australian version of Parkinson, she said in that professionally challenging manner of hers: ‘What I want to know, Clive, is do you ever think any more about Plato and Shelley?’ No doubt he does. A large part of ...”

“... in exile here, such as Richard Neville, the editor of Oz, hurried home to help with the crusade. Germaine Greer briefly ceased to knock her own country. Almost anything seemed possible. In three years, the dream collapsed, in circumstances that had a lasting effect. On 11 November 1975 the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, dismissed Whitlam as Prime ...”

“... meanwhile, took off like a cartoon aeroplane, with a celebrity figurehead at every window: Germaine Greer in her peekaboo Female Eunuch T-shirt, the visionary Andrea Dworkin with her prophetic hair, Naomi Wolf in a vagina-pasta necklace.Sweet Freedom did not ignore the ‘strange stirring’ Betty Friedan had noticed in the American suburbs of the ...”

“... that British feminism is jealous of her because it has not produced anyone of stature since Germaine Greer – ‘and she’s Australian.’ But the real problem with the Americans is not their rudeness so much as their politics, or lack of it. Wolf’s 1991 Fire with Fire – her call for a realpolitik in which ‘sisterhood and capital’ might ...”

“... between the ages of roughly twelve and fifty is doing. Menstrual etiquette explains why, as Germaine Greer pointed out in the 1970s, a woman in a restaurant takes her entire handbag with her to the ladies’ room, instead of simply carrying a tampon in her hand: something, it has just occurred to me, I have still not seen a woman do in mixed ...”

“... is Difficult Women, an unflattering account of his friendship with Sonia Orwell, Jean Rhys and Germaine Greer. He won’t be winning first prize for dignity, but he tells it pretty much like it was – and like he was, you imagine. But discretion is never his first instinct. As for Stephen himself, I sometimes wonder if he wants me to write in my ...”

“... calmly browbeating a smarmy male editor during the Ladies’ Home Journal sit-in of 1970. And Germaine Greer, of course, a feather-cut hipster dryad: ‘It’s a cinch to have an orgasm. I can give an orgasm to my cat!’ And ever since, this book-as-bomb model has come to stand for the progress of feminism in general: Naomi Wolf (The Beauty ...”

“... predecessors. Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of 17th-Century Women’s Verse (1988), edited by Germaine Greer and others, an anthology which does not modernise the ‘incidentals’, is a valuable supplement to Lonsdale’s collection. To begin in 1700 is to begin in the midst of things, an abrupt start that cuts off the vision of connections between ...”

“... joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing power of an undemocratic state by an ...”

“... Bok of Harvard and Mr Yuri Zhukov, Chairman of the Soviet Peace Committee, Simone Veil and Germaine Greer. Interesting and able people all ... well, some. But thrown together without preparation and in pompous session we did worse than a good graduate seminar. Very large rhetoric about universal human ends tends to leave wind in the bowels. Why ...”

“... bodies – gynaecology and geriatrics – firmly at the centre of female secondary status. In 1970 Germaine Greer brought out The Female Eunuch, which owes a huge debt to its French foremother, but parted from her in the defiant rallying call Greer issued to her sisters, in the incandescent eloquence she used to refuse ...”

“... forced to use men’s toilets and locker rooms who is likely to be subject to sexual assault. Germaine Greer is perhaps the best-known advocate of this position, or a version of it. She famously described male-to-female transsexuals as ‘pantomime dames’, had to resign as a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge more or less as a consequence (after ...”

“... and, though provided with new introductions in 1994 and supplementary essays by Peter Ackroyd and Germaine Greer thereafter, is still based on a text prepared by Peter Alexander in 1951. It is surely not a coincidence that the RSC is the same price as the hardbacks of the revised Oxford and the Complete Pelican, although its designers have gone out of ...”