We have bought exclusive rights to the following extracts:Monday: met Naomi Wolf and AS Byatt at the manicurist’s. Talked shop, debating what works better: mascara, eyelash dye, eye-liner or tattoos Had mineral water for lunch then dashed for my massage Later had a drink with Martin Amis He gave me the name of a good dentist. I think I’ll change my name to George and just try to be interesting You can’t win. If you’re beautiful enough to get published, everyone will accuse you of getting published only because you’re good-looking.
Soon to reach the shelves is The Diary of a Novelist. But in these enlightened times, even if you’re a violinist, you’ve got to look good in a bathing-suit.

If the author is a woman she’s got to be good-looking and if the author is a man he’s got to be interesting.”

Whatever happened to the cult of the unphotogenic recluse? They were very popular in the Middle Ages. But until then the dead Enemy, with white face and stilled hands, will seem more like a lost friend.. IN AN article in last Monday’s Guardian Linda Grant bemoaned the fact that these days, if you aren’t a “babe” you can’t get published Things you wish you hadn’t read. I’d suspected as much, but had hoped it was only my paranoid imaginings. She quotes Derek Johns, a literary agent: “Literary fiction is hard to sell …

Perhaps in the end the empowerment granted by new technology will outweigh the forces out to terrorise and casualise workers who have given up their watches. This is about job security, about a tragic compulsion to seem keen and competitive – when all experience should teach that those who work hardest for least are the first to be thrown on the skip in hard times.We have slain the clock – and the first result is that our time is no longer our own. Yet the statistics show that general British working hours are lengthening (after diminishing for 150 years), that they are longer than in other European countries, and that 60 per cent of employed British men and 45 per cent of women now “usually or sometimes” work on Saturdays.Hyperwork is about being driven But by what? It is not simply the need for money Hyperwork is, by traditional hourly standards, underpaid. Some have contracts with minimum or maximum hours, but neither employer nor employee seems to remember them. The concept of “overtime” is a half-remembered term from history, like villenage.Many of these hyperworkers, as often women as men, have young children It is hard to see where space for family life exists.