Difficult Women: A History Of Feminism In 11 Fights
Helen Lewis Jonathan Cape, £16.99
It’s never been easier to find a feminist role model. Publishing is awash with gutsy heroines thanks to series such as Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls, which celebrates extraordinary women.
But such books are hamstrung by a tendency to edit out the less appealing elements of trailblazers. For journalist Helen Lewis, this has been bad news for feminism, diluting ‘a radical political movement into feelgood inspiration porn’.
Difficult Women is pitched as an antidote to that, offering unvarnished portraits of the figures on the front line of 11 key battles for women’s rights.
Helen Lewis looks at the problematic aspects of more famous figures, such as birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes (above), who also campaigned for eugenics
In chapters that cover subjects including divorce, the vote, work and abortion, we meet Lady Constance Lytton, a suffragette who blew the lid on the horrors of force-feeding, and Marie Bonaparte, a French princess who investigated why some women had bad sex.
Just as riveting is Lewis’s look at the problematic aspects of more famous figures, such as birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes, who also campaigned for eugenics.
As well as focusing on disruptive individuals, Lewis explores what it means to cause difficulty as a woman generally, arguing that doing so is essential to getting anything done.
‘What can feminists learn from the Difficult Women of the past?’ she asks. ‘First, that making progress means making enemies.’
Blending rigorous research with passages that make you bark with laughter, this is an effortlessly smart study of feminism’s power to make society better for everyone.
Death By Shakespeare
Kathryn Harkup Bloomsbury, £16.99
Rating: 
Next time someone bemoans the body-count in the latest horror flick, ask them how many people are rubbed out in the works of William Shakespeare. The answer, reveals Kathryn Harkup in this look at how realistic his deaths are, is that the Bard bumped off more than 250 named characters.
Add the countless unnamed walk-ons who bite the dust and we’re dealing with one of the most prolific killers there’s ever been.
Mind you, death was all around in Elizabethan England. Life was nasty, brutish and short, and death what Harkup calls a ‘social event’. There was no getting away from it.
Unlike so many of us today, Shakespeare knew what death and serious injury looked, sounded and smelled like. So did his players
Unlike so many of us today, Shakespeare knew what death and serious injury looked, sounded and smelled like. So did his players. These days, when actors pluck out Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear, they’re really squeezing on lychees.
Back in the Bard’s day, though, the props guy was a regular down at the slaughterhouse – where genuine eyeballs were readily available.
Not that all Shakespearean deaths are realistic. Suicide would have been a much messier business than even the longest of Shakespeare plays allows, Harkup argues. Nor did he know his poisons.
Much of the witches’ brew in Macbeth, with its fillet of snake and toe of frog, might be disgusting – but it wouldn’t be that toxic. Tooth of wolf, on the other hand, could be a reference to ergot, a black, fang-shaped fungus that cuts off your blood supply, before blinding and killing you.
Thankfully, the majority of deaths in Shakespeare are less stomach-churning. Fencing was to Elizabethan theatregoers what gunplay is to gamers today – and Shakespeare gave them what they wanted, with 22 sword fights in Henry IV part one alone.
Were I a schoolteacher introducing phone-addicted teens to Macbeth or Romeo And Juliet, I’d go in big on Shakespeare’s ‘violent delights’.
Christopher Bray