About

Before becoming an academic I worked for many years as a successful journalist. My career in journalism includes feature writing for many national newspapers and magazines including The Evening Standard, The Daily Mail, Cosmopolitan and the New Statesman. I wrote a regular column for the Ecologist Magazine between 2003-2005. But my main work has been for The Guardian and The Observer where I have been an op-ed columnist on both papers. I wrote a regular column for The Guardian's Comment pages between 1995 and 2004 and between 2007-2009 I wrote a regular column for the Guardian's Family section called Looking After Mother. I still write regularly for both the Guardian and the Daily Mail.

I am author of several books including Language and Materialism (with John Ellis), Female Desire (HarperCollins), Our Treacherous Hearts (Faber), The Whole Truth (Faber) and Sacred Cows (Harper Collins). I am author of Diana, the Portrait (Harper Collins) and a co-author of Mandela , the Portrait commissioned by the Mandela Foundation. My new book, Speaking Personally: The Personal Voice in Journalism will be published next year by Palgrave Macmillan