We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better. Why should they? Sometimes I think we're moving into a new ice age of tyra… - Doris Lessing

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.

Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, as with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to look carefully at our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is a desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists or feminists or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers.

Yes. Laugh. But there’s sense in the old rules. They kept people out of trouble.’ He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in my position needed extra dignity of behaviour. ‘What position?’ - I was suddenly very angry, because of the trapped feeling women get at such moments.