Sarah Jacob was the first recognised anorexic - a distinction for which she worked extremely hard and paid with her life. As the term "anorexia nervosa" did not exist until 1873, four years after Sarah's death, a number of less scientific explanations were given for how Sarah had seemed to live on air alone. Was she a miraculous fasting girl, a hysterical nutcase (the diagnostic catch-all for most female disorders), [...]

As any model worth her Marlboro Lights knows, a pretty face and a great body are no longer enough: you need to become an ambassador or found a new school of yoga to be taken seriously these days. Not only does Sophie Dahl have genes that gave her Bambi eyes and peaches-and-cream skin, she also comes from a fine literary pedigree. Gorgeous, young and famous, Sophie is a publisher's fantasy [...]

Kingsley Amis's observation that "Women are much nicer than men/No wonder we like them" might have made a witty epigraph to Elizabeth Jane Howard's memoir. "I feel as though I have lived most of my life in the slipstream of experience," she writes (a glancing reference to Martin Amis's memoir Experience, perhaps). Indeed, she seems often to have been drawn almost helplessly along in the more forceful path of others [...]

''The dead don't die. They look on and help," D H Lawrence once wrote. This consoling platitude lies at the heart of The Lovely Bones, a bestseller and critical triumph in America. Narrated by the spirit of a murdered teenager as she observes her grieving family from heaven, Sebold's at once brutally real and fanciful first novel is often as queasily sentimental as it sounds. It is also grimly captivating. [...]

Nick McDonell is the latest literary wunderkind on the block, apparently. Clever, cute (and well connected in the world of books), he is being hailed as the voice of New York's dissolute, smart young set.

Unlike other recent puppies (precocious up-and-coming publishing sensations), McDonell has eschewed big themes and clever conceits for the more healthy, adolescent attractions of sex, drugs and a slickly violent storyline. After all, at only 18, [...]

No sooner is one baby war almost over than another begins. DNA is everywhere: yet more women want a sample from the billionaire Stephen Bing and a high court case in Britain aims to give individuals conceived by artificial insemination the right to information about their donors.

Fathers and children are questioning relationships that previously had to be accepted on trust (one dilemma mothers are happily spared). And they are [...]

The Mediaeval Baebes, Bond and Charlotte Church are creating most of the noise in classical music at the moment. With the exception of Miss Church, of whom we've all heard quite enough, these might be unfamiliar names to many. Transparently alluded to as "the wet T-shirt quartets", these scantily clad girls who dare to call themselves classical musicians were the target of an impassioned speech given by Sir Thomas Allen [...]