Saturday 26 July 2008

Only on Sundays by Katharine Whitehorn

A collection of Whitehorn's columns from the Observer, put together in the late sixties. I picked this up from the Sunday market at Brighton railway station, having recently read her memoirs Selective Memory. This has been an entertaining bedtime read; Whitehorn is witty, with a good hand for a literary pun, and a compassionate and tolerant observer of others. What struck me is that lots of these columns could be published now and still tap into current anxieties; about parenting, about gender roles or about social interaction. Either Whitehorn was able to identify enduring, persistent areas for debate, or we have moved on remarkably little in forty years.