In more than 40 years as a journalist, I've interviewed some terrifying people. Manuel Contreras, Chile's chief of secret police, who ordered the torture and murder of tens of thousands of people. Roberto d'Aubuisson, head of El Salvador's right-wing death squads.

Yesterday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences produced yet another all-male slate for the Best Director category of the Oscars-and provoked yet another round of outrage that America's culture industry is incapable of recognizing the achievements of women. But there is, in fact, a...

I love romance. I loved it long before I ever fell in love, and romance narratives served as a kind of template for my own early love-affairs. I filled out diaries with imagined meet-cutes between my crushes and me, assigning them lines I had read some other, more sophisticated love interest say...

If you grew up on Terry McMillan's books, you know that she's the doyenne of a particular type of black women's lit. It hinges on sisterhood and love but doesn't shy away from confronting how hard it can be to find happiness.

‘The biggest kick is reading something new and exciting and then getting other people to share your enthusiasm... Beyond all the cant and hypocrisy in publishing, that's what it's all about...'

On receiving the Maxwell Perkins Award for lifetime achievement:

An independent bookshop that failed to sell a single book on a rainy day this week has been inundated with customers after publishing pictures of its empty aisles on social media.

The Petersfield Bookshop in Hampshire sent a melancholy tweet revealing that it had not welcomed one paying...