It turned society upside down in 1970 and kick-started the women’s movement. But can The Female Eunuch deliver any important life lessons today? First-time reader Alice Jones gives her verdict

40th anniversary of 'The Female Eunuch' provokes astonishing attack on seminal text of women's liberation

The heart of the matter

Performance poetry conjures up images of po-faced writers declaiming depressing verse. Could a young collective bring some humour to the spoken word? Holly Williams takes a masterclass

The premise of Francis Wheen's new account of the Seventies, Strange Days Indeed, is that recent history can seem remarkably distant. It was pre- mobile phones, pre-Tony Blair and early Germaine Greer. Given the timescale, it is not surprising that we have lurched rather than marched towards social progress, particularly in the field of human relations.

Andrew Johnson, Gemma Mcintosh and Russell Arkinstall find the literary world's former enfant terrible still dividing critical opinion

First Jack Straw, then Lt-Col Henry Worsley – now Alastair Campbell has become the latest public figure to fall victim to one of the credit crunch's money-laundering scams.

A new exhibition from activist and revolutionary John 'Hoppy' Hopkins has opened at the Idea Generation Gallery.

Zoe Lyons has been on the UK comedy circuit for six years, gigging in clubs and fringe festivals all over the country with her own brand of observational wit. She was made a patron of Pride in 2007, and will be performing at the Southbank's Udderbelly venue as part of this year's festival, alongside Craig Hill, Susan Calman and Jonathan Mayor, in Stand Up with Pride!

The first edition of The Independent on Sunday Review, on 28 January 1990, was a generous launching pad for keen young book reviewers. Alongside Anita Brookner and Germaine Greer the books pages carried an essay by Alan Bennett ("Anthony Powell's Books Do Furnish a Room was not my mother's way of thinking," he wrote. "'Books untidy a room' more like or, as she would have said, 'Books upset'") and a column by some chap called Sebastian Faulks. His first column for The Sunday Review was a literary ramble about driving a Sinclair C5 and was much like this one in tone, but with better hair. He left the paper not long afterwards to "concentrate on his writing". Nobody knows what has happened to him since.

Professor Germaine Greer will add her confrontational voice to the call by Prowess, the women's enterprise network, for more female entrepreneurs to lead us out of recession. Ms Greer, speaking at the Prowess international conference in Blackpool this week, will also back its campaign urging the Government to put more pressure on banks to help businesses by extending and renewing overdrafts and other facilities.

A new play satirising feminism has enraged Germaine Greer, on whose experience it is loosely based

That banshee wail you hear when the wind is in the northeast is the sound of the biter bit – Germaine Greer is very, very angry at the author of this play about a sixty-ish feminist scribbler (played by Eileen Atkins). Its action is inspired by the time Greer was, briefly, held hostage by a devotee. And that sound you hear from the Vaudeville is the audience roaring at the best Ayckbourn play Alan Ayckbourn never wrote. Joanna Murray-Smith has expanded the original incident into a chorus of demands for approval, apologies, explanations, relief, compensation, and closure. No one, it seems, can be satisfied, but, at the end, remarkably, all are happy, rolling in love, money, and taramasalata.

Academic says that thinly veiled portrait of her is by female writer 'who holds feminism in contempt'