A scientific and historical survey of patriarchy shows that there’s nothing inevitable about it

Are men and women naturally different, and do the roles socially assigned to us proceed from those differences? Refreshingly, science journalist and broadcaster Angela Saini begins her stirring interrogation of patriarchy by arguing that it is neither constant, inevitable nor unshakeable. “By thinking about gendered inequality as rooted in something unalterable within us, we fail to see it for what it is,” she writes, “something more fragile that has had to be constantly remade and reasserted.”

Anthropologists, political theorists, feminists and, importantly, patriarchs themselves have often reached across time and space to look for the origins of sex and gender division. In 1680, Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha invoked ancient and biblical authorities as evidence that patriarchy (with the divine right of kings at its head) was natural and ordered by God. Even when later revolutionaries rejected the idea of a king as the head of a nation-family, they were reluctant to let go of elite male power. Thomas Jefferson wrote, creepily, that “the tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion”.

The BBC Newsnight reporter looks at what led to the closure of the Tavistock Centre, and what it means to be transgender

There are knowns, as the saying goes, and there are known unknowns. But most difficult of all, perhaps, are the things we can’t know for sure, but must still make definitive judgments about. The latter form the heart of the BBC journalist Hannah Barnes’s densely reported account of events inside the Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) in London, the country’s only specialist clinic for transgender children, where, as one clinician tells her, it was “impossible to be sure” of getting decisions 100% right, but mistakes had frightening consequences.

The book traces Gids’s evolution from its foundation in 1989 – offering a non-judgmental therapeutic approach to exploring gender identity, and serving a handful of mainly natal boys – to a modern service swamped by demand, much of it from natal girls, providing a gateway for the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs.

Tackling gendered insults head on, A-list authors deliver a smart anthology of fun and fearless tales to celebrate Virago’s 50th birthday

“Attempting to diminish women by name-calling is nothing new,” notes Sandi Toksvig in her introduction to Virago’s 50th birthday anthology. Founded to counteract the under-representation of female writers, Virago has become a publishing powerhouse. Yet the public discourse and the online treatment of women grow ever more aggressive. I’m not sure this anthology can harness the power of a Siren or a Spitfire (to give two sample story titles) to stem the tide, but it’s certainly fun.

Furies is a starry collection, with new stories by four-time Booker-nominated Ali Smith, Emma Donoghue – whose novel Room was adapted into a hit Hollywood film– Margaret Atwood and Women’s prize for fiction-winner Kamila Shamsie, among others. Most of the titles – rather vintage-seeming gendered insults – have a degree of ambiguity baked in, perhaps even a lurking admiration for the distinctive, unpredictable woman. Who wouldn’t be somewhat flattered to be called a Warrior, a Fury, a Dragon or even a She-Devil? Other stories take on the Wench, Hussy and Tygress – the latter in a lovely piece by Claire Kohda, whose narrator’s beloved mother is a tiger who would “always give me a long kiss on the forehead … and her whiskers would tickle my eyelids.”

For the author of The Ungrateful Refugee, all the world’s a stage; its gatekeepers – immigration officers, courts, cops – incredulous audiences that the most vulnerable have to convince

When the burning metal rod sank into his shoulder, K passed out to the sound of his own screams. He sensed more burning wounds on his back when he came round. It was August 2009 and he was in a government interrogation room in Sri Lanka. K’s torturers kept asking him where the gold was that he hid for the Tamil Tigers. “I swear I don’t know,” he told them. “I’m not LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam]. I’m a jeweller’s assistant.” They poured petrol over his wounded body and threatened to set it alight unless he told them what they wanted to know.

Or did they? Did any of this happen? When K arrived in the UK in 2011, he sought asylum, but had his claim repeatedly rejected. The scars, officials decided, could have been caused by what was known officially as “wounding SIBP” (self-inflicted by proxy), in order to manufacture evidence in support of a false asylum claim.

Emergency relief must be about money, not well-intentioned donations of goods

The first time I understood quite how bad emergency relief can be was in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004. From the dockside, first responders fed back stories of containers full of pots and pans with broken handles, soiled clothing and expired medication. As accounts started to come in about quite how unhelpful and time consuming it was, all around me in England church halls and primary schools continued to collect items that they thought might help. The impulse was quite understandable; the unintended consequences grimly depressing.

The tsunami was a terrifying event on a huge scale. Sadly, in emergency planning and disaster response, such events come around more than we would like. As we know only too well, in the early hours of 6 February, extremely powerful earthquakes rocked southern Turkey and northern Syria, causing incalculable suffering and killing more than 47,000 people, many of them as they slept in their beds.

The Leon co-founder and campaigner points the finger at the forces that make modern diets so unhealthy

One morning as he was getting up, Henry Dimbleby’s daughter asked him if he’d always been quite so chubby. It was, he admits, both “a bruising start to the day” and a tricky question to answer. “Maintaining a healthy weight”, for the co-founder of Leon restaurants turned food campaigner, “has always been a struggle”. And Dimbleby isn’t the only one. In fact, he says, 28% of us are clinically obese, which is startling when you compare that with just 1% of the population in 1950, an age when the planet too was in far better nick. It isn’t that we’re greedy, but we are not entirely blameless either. In Dimbleby’s words, it would be wrong to say that we “are powerless in the jaws of the machine”, but, as he shows, the machine is a formidable creation of supermarkets, food giants and fast-food chains. Ravenous, which is co-written by Dimbleby’s wife, the journalist Jemima Lewis, is a highly readable account of what needs to happen in order for us to both save the planet and fit into those old jeans again.

Part of the problem is that the enemy is invisible. Most of us don’t even realise our eating habits are largely informed by a dystopian system we can’t see – one that produces, processes, markets and sells the food we eat. On a train heading for London, Dimbleby buys a “handmade” egg sandwich and turns it over to see that it contains 32 ingredients, including things most of us will have never heard of. When did you last put “diacetyl tartaric acid” in your shopping basket? Even natural-sounding ingredients, such as rapeseed oil, are often highly processed. In fact, highly processed foods make up 57% of our diet, a higher proportion than any other European country. The consequences are stark. Studies have shown, Dimbleby writes, that a “10% increase in the proportion of ultra-processed foods in a person’s diet is correlated with a 12% increase in cancers, a 21% increase in depressive symptoms, and a 12% increase in cardiovascular disease risk”. In a sense, it’s simple – these foods contain more of the things that cause us harm, such as sugars and fats. But it’s these very things, combined in a complicated way, that create “moreishness” – those crisps in your cupboard are designed so that you just can’t stop.

The artist and writer offers a powerful critique of the way we conceive of time in the modern, industrial world, and explores alternatives

Time took on an elastic and sinuous quality during the Covid-19 lockdowns, if it retained any coherence at all. Days bled into each other, as did walks and Zoom catchups and Sopranos episodes. Feeling a sense of “temporal weirdness”, California artist and writer Jenny Odell set up a camera on a tripod facing her window. “Time felt the same in my room, but in the photos, it rained, it stormed, and the fog rolled in from San Francisco,” she recalls. Flicking through the photos, Odell encountered a mysterious emotion that she calls “it”: an experience of being taken out of the present moment, with all that was familiar rendered strange and changeable, and wide vistas of possibility opened up.

This feeling of “it” – the sense that everything and everyone could at any moment be made anew – runs through her cultural and political meditation, Saving Time. Odell, who previously critiqued the attention economy in How to Do Nothing, sets the stakes high for her new investigation. Observing that popular attitudes to time – as, say, an unrelenting march towards inevitable climate apocalypse – encourage a self-fulfilling nihilism, she proposes a different model, more attuned to the natural world.

A public health expert charts the cumulative effect of prejudice on peoples’ bodies, from heart disease to cancer

Arline Geronimus has spent the last 40 years researching racial and class injustice in the US. Her first non-academic bookis the culmination of a life’s groundbreaking work. The term “weathering”, which she coined decades ago, is today widely recognised in public health, and refers to the process of chronic social and psychological stress that activates harmful biological processes among people in marginalised communities, ageing their bodies prematurely. She presents a staggering accumulation of evidence to show how daily discrimination grinds people down and all too often leads to debilitating illness and early death.

While the impact of weathering is starkest and most shocking in the health outcomes of Black Americans compared to other communities, the phenomenon transcends race. Only 50% of impoverished white people in Kentucky – from the social group sometimes stereotyped as “hillbillies” – are expected to reach the age of 50 without a “health-induced disability”. It’s a statistic mirrored among Black people living in deprived areas of Chicago. For both, the leading causes of excess deaths are not opioids and gun crime, as the respective cliches might suggest but, rather, chronic issues of the kind associated with weathering: cardiovascular disease and cancer. What these two groups have in common is not simply poverty: it is the fact that they are both viewed with “contempt, fear or resentment” by those around them.

Saini’s stirring, all too timely study of patriarchy asks how such inequality took hold, and persists, even while some matrilineal societies flourish

Angela Saini’s 2017 Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong (2017) interrogated sexism in science and reminded readers that there is no biological basis for entrenched inequality between the sexes. That understanding has now led her to explore how, in that case, patriarchy took root, let alone became so powerful throughout history and across the world.

This is a vital question, and never more so than now. With the backlash against women’s rights that we see in so many places, from Afghanistan to the US, Iran to Russia, we need to think more about how patriarchal societies begin, how they are maintained – and how they can be changed.

For the sociologist and Pulitzer prize-winning author of Evicted, a heartbreaking study of the American housing crisis, bearing witness was not enough. In his new book, Poverty, By America, he offers solutions

At the time of the election of Donald Trump in 2016, there was a lot of soul-searching among liberal American journalists over their failure to closely report and reflect the lives of those “left behind” citizens in the “rust-belt” states, the places that gave Trump victory. One book that came out that year, Evicted, by Matthew Desmond, a professor at Princeton, was an unforgettable example of the kind of reporting that had been neglected.

For two years, beginning in 2008, Desmond had lived among the people at the very harshest end of American society. He took up residence first in a trailer park, and then in the poorest quarter of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In befriending families unable to pay their bills, who had desperately moved from one home to another, and also the landlords who profited from them and turned them out on to the street, he presented a series of vivid, heartbreaking portraits of people drowning in a system loaded against the most vulnerable. His conclusion back then was a stark one: not only that the constant threat and reality of eviction was the number one factor in perpetuating destitution, but also that there were many people making a lot of money from keeping other people in that traumatic, impoverished state.

Dismissed by some as mere speculation, examining ‘what ifs’ can shed valuable light on neglected perspectives

Thinking about alternative scenarios is tempting, both in our everyday lives and when we are trying to make sense of the past. Questions about what happened slide very easily into conjectures: what if it didn’t happen, or happened differently? Historians tend not to take kindly to such speculation. Fiction is fuelled by it.

In November 1616, the first English ambassador to India, Sir Thomas Roe, wrote a letter to his paymasters in the East India Company. Roe’s letter is full of frustration at being treated as the representative of a minor “Frankish” power by the opulent Mughal court, but its main focus is on the company’s own errors. He warns them repeatedly that “warr and trafique [trade] are incompatible”, and it was better to seek profit in “quiett trade”. Roe was no idealist when it came to English global ambitions. His advice was grounded in the best use of the company’s resources rather than any view of the ethical justification of empire, but it is significant all the same. As history tells us, quiet trade did not remain the aim of the English in India. What would have happened if Roe’s advice had been followed? As I worked on a history of the first English embassy to India, this was a question that raised its head repeatedly, both in my own thinking and in conversations with others. While the simple answer is that there is no telling, ignoring the question means imposing a sense of inevitability on the presence of the British in India, erasing the uncertainties that defined it.

A clinical psychologist turns the spotlight on caregivers in this profoundly compassionate study

An elegant woman enjoys a gin and tonic and dinner with her husband in a cosy Italian restaurant near their Greenwich Village apartment; their relaxed, lighthearted conversation, long familiar to them, doesn’t miss a beat. But as the time to leave this regular date draws near, he bids her farewell and she, in practised response, surreptitiously changes her dressy shoes to trainers so that she can rush home to arrive before he does. Once there, their dinner will be entirely forgotten to him and, in a painful reversal of their previous intimacy, he will ask her to leave – in the past he has evicted her to spend the night in the hallway or even called the police. He will not believe that they are married, and will react to evidence to the contrary – their shared belongings, anecdotes of their life together – as though it were planted or invented, a rotten fraud being perpetrated on him.

In Travellers to Unimaginable Lands, Dasha Kiper, a clinical psychologist who works with caregivers to people suffering from dementia, is primarily focused on Elizabeth, the wife; what this form of apparent rejection means to her, and how she is able – or not – to negotiate it. There is no story in this book that is not equally heartbreaking: whether it is quotidian, as in the mother who repeatedly removes items from the freezer despite her daughter’s dogged attempts to stop her with entreaties or taped-up instructions; or whether it is comparatively elaborate, as in the elderly woman who befriends the dead authors in photographs on the books she loves, going so far as to invite Stefan Zweig for dinner and ignoring her husband as she attempts, with no outward sign of success, to make conversation with him.

A Pulitzer-winning sociologist argues that the United States’s gross inequality is no accident

It’s no wonder Americans have failed to eliminate poverty, sociologist Matthew Desmond maintains in his new book. He believes the better-off are fighting a class war, keeping the poor down by design. Even if he shies away from some of the consequences of his explosive claim, his arguments have the potential to push debate about wealth in America to a new level.

Having won a coveted MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2015, Desmond is known for his absorbing previous book on eviction practices in housing, which netted him a Pulitzer prize in 2017. He starts his ambitious new study by demonstrating how enduring American poverty is. The current poverty line is represented by an income of $13,590 a year for an individual and $27,750 for a family of four. The number of Americans below it has hovered between 10% and 15% for decades, with calls and plans for reform amounting to “50 years of nothing”. The only exception was the brief period of pandemic relief, which drove poverty down “tremendously” – for children, by more than 50%. But things are now returning to form. The Democrats ended much emergency relief last autumn and cut new entitlements for the worst-off from an Inflation Reduction Act that privileged green capitalism.

John Eldridge made a powerful impact on my teaching and thinking, first as a tutor-organiser for the Workers’ Educational Association in the 1970s, and, later, as a research worker on a project at the University of Glasgow whose remit was to produce teaching materials for all those – imagined – worker representatives on company boards as proposed by the Bullock report of 1977.

John was on the advisory board of what was a difficult project, but one of the few academics involved who appeared to know much about trade unions and, more importantly, to express any empathetic support for what unions were trying to achieve. I valued his views considerably.

The poet’s Joni Mitchell-inspired memoir of her partnerless life marks an important shift in ideas about intimacy and solitude

A couple of years ago, I tried to create a playlist of songs for those who were, like me, long-term single. The result was not as uplifting as I’d hoped. It kicked off with a couple of bangers – You Can’t Hurry Love by the Supremes, Independent Women Part 1 by Destiny’s Child – but quickly got a bit too real. Goodbye to Love by the Carpenters. Somebody to Love by Queen. I gave up the attempt when I found myself weeping along to George Gershwin’s But Not for Me.

As melancholic as those tracks were, I never got as far as plundering Joni Mitchell’s oeuvre. After all, Joni’s art is scored to the bone with the pleasure and pain of romantic relationships. Her 1971 masterpiece, Blue, fairly groans with love and the heartaches it has wrought. The real-life affairs enshrined within its 36-minute playtime are well documented, from the two-year relationship with “My Old Man” Graham Nash to the soulful connection with James Taylor that gave Joni her title track. Blue may be one of the greatest singer-songwriter albums of all time, but it’s not an obvious soundtrack for stubborn, unshifting singlehood.

In this compelling account, the author and documentary-maker describes how decades of covert communications between the British government and the IRA eased the path to the Good Friday agreement – helped by an unlikely hero

In late November 1993, the Observer published a front-page story that astounded many of its readers and triggered political tremors across the UK, Ireland and beyond. Under the headline “Major’s secret links with IRA leadership revealed”, the newspaper reported that the British government had been engaged in secret back-channel communications with senior republicans, with prime minister John Major’s approval.

IRA bullets and bombs had killed 33 people that year alone. Four of the victims were children aged between three and 13. Weeks earlier, Major had told MPs that it “would turn my stomach” to sit down and talk to the organisation.

The journalist and former in-patient offers a clear-eyed view of a debilitating and misunderstood illness

Hadley Freeman was 14 when a seemingly innocuous comment blew her life apart. Three years earlier her family had relocated from New York to London, and she enjoyed the special status that being American conferred on her among her British peers. But she struggled to find her place among teenage girls who were embracing bras and boys – “The grown-up world was pressing in, monsters making the door bulge inwards while I frantically tried to push it back.”

On this particular day, Freeman was in a PE lesson at school, sitting on the floor, legs outstretched, next to a girl named Lizzie. Noting Lizzie’s skinny legs, and her own “matronly trunks”, she asked Lizzie if it was hard to find clothes when you’re small. “Yeah,” she replied. “I wish I was normal like you.” At this, Freeman writes, “a black tunnel yawned open inside me, and I tumbled down it, Alice into Nowhereland. ‘Normal.’ Not ‘slim’, not ‘thin’ – ‘normal’. Normal was average. Normal was boring. Normal was nothing.”

From the treatment of BAME patients historically to the disproportionate number of Covid deaths, this important study by an NHS doctor exposes discrimination in healthcare

Annabel Sowemimo is an NHS doctor, a registrar in sexual and reproductive health, and an academic and broadcaster on the intersection of race and medicine. Her new book, Divided, began as a column on decolonising healthcare for gal-dem– an influential platform for writers of colour – which, sadly, recently closed. Those articles have led to this important and ambitious title, which seeks to educate readers about the racist origins of western medicine, asking for recognition of the mistreatment of patients in the past, and calling for a correction to systemic and institutionalised discriminatory practice.

She is refreshingly honest about the lack of easy answers and acknowledges her frustration. “Well, what do you suggest we do instead then?” as a master’s student asks in the epilogue. But Divided is a necessary book, and pertinent, if also of its time in that it reads as if much of it was written during the pandemic, fuelled by those terrifyingly pointed losses of BAME clinicians in spring 2020 (the first 20 NHS workers who died from the virus were non-white). It soon became obvious that BAME staff were disproportionately exposed and dying from the virus, at risk from the patients for whom they provided care. Sowemimo felt she “had to write the book” as no one could deny “that health inequalities and uneven power relations exist”.

The Nobel laureate’s diaristic reflections on retail leave much to be desired

Supermarkets. What are they? Places to shop, to fill your fridge? Sociologists have argued that they are “non-places” – soulless, inferior to more modestly sized grocers, evidence of the horrors of modern agronomics, shrines to the banality of consumerism. For Don DeLillo, in White Noise, a supermarket “changes us spiritually, it prepares us, it’s a gateway … All the letters and numbers are here, all the colours of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases.”

Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel prize in literature, sees supermarkets as a spectacle and a kind of commons. In no other space, private or public, are people “brought into greater contact with their fellow humans”. Yet, because shopping is often portrayed as a chore, and a female chore at that, supermarkets are ignored by “politicians, journalists, ‘experts’”, who, as a result, “do not know the social reality of France today”.

A stirring call to make justice and equity a reality by applying the ideas of liberal philosopher John Rawls

If members of the shadow frontbench seek inspiration on how to differentiate their future administration from the mendacious nonentities who have run the country for the past 13 years, they could do worse than read this book. Free and Equal is a stirring call by an LSE philosopher and economist for egalitarian liberalism based on the ideas of John Rawls. The late Harvard professor wrote a book 50 years ago that saw him feted as a political thinker of the calibre of Plato, Hobbes and Mill, but, as far as I can tell, he had precisely zero impact on the real world. Maybe now his time has come.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls invited us to imagine what a just society would look like by means of an elegant thought experiment. Suppose, Rawls suggested, that we are all behind what he calls a “veil of ignorance”, with knowledge of our talents, income and wealth, as well as our core values, temporarily erased. In this “original position”, what principles of justice would we agree to be bound by? What kind of social contract would we devise to ensure the society we lived in was a good one? Rawls argued that we would choose a set of basic liberties necessary for flourishing, including freedom of expression and of conscience, and a free choice of occupation.