Gaby Hinsliff

"Female friendships are built on knowing about the minutiae, and just like news, they require your presence."

"But the reason Im not naming Sex Kitten Man either is that making this about any one particular idiot risks letting all the other idiots off the hook. For the point is it could have been any idiot."

"Its not that were necessarily desperate to get into your club. Its more that we learned the hard way to be suspicious of men who want to keep us out."

"The opening scene of Breathtaking, in which fictional consultant Abbey Henderson discovers that a mask meant to protect her from a deadly virus doesn’t fit because it was shaped for male jaws, meanwhile almost uncannily echoes the evidence given by senior civil servant Helen MacNamara to the Covid inquiry last year about how hard it was to get the problems women were experiencing with PPE taken seriously in Whitehall."

"So I didnt say anything, and for years continued to have a perfectly professional and often productive (in story terms) working relationship with Sex Kitten Man. And he rose into cabinet, where eventually his career imploded over an entirely unrelated error of judgment. Well, I say unrelated; a man who once did something slightly stupid went on to do something much more stupid."

"When men wonder why women wont just let them have their cosy little clubs in peace, one answer is that we fear the mentality those cosy little clubs can sometimes produce."