Kate Christensen

The male muse is an unaccountably rare thing in art. Where does that leave female artists looking for inspiration?

As my family saw them, men were untrustworthy, weak, and selfish. Our mother taught us to get along without them, to get along without much of anything, and to live well and have fun anyway.

Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Under its influence, ordinary songs take on dimensions and powers, like emotional superheroes.

James Bond is quite serious about his drinks and clothing and cigarettes and food and all that sort of thing. There is nothing wry or amused about James Bond.

Democracy, loudly upheld as a cure for much of the ailing world, has proved no guarantor of political wisdom, even if it remains the least bad form of government.

People of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice but from a paralysing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.