Critic Cal

You've let yourself go, you're a 3, you're a 9 but you're vain, you're too thin, you're too fat, you're too much at the gym, you have body hair, pores, too much make-up, you're dressed like a frump, like a tramp, you're a prude, you're a prick-tease, a turn-off, a slut, you're too girly, too butch, you're not smiling, you're endlessly styling your hair, it's too frizzy, too flat, you spend too much on products, you're visibly ageing, you must have had work done, you've lapsed in your duty of care, you're no more than a housewife, you're too career-driven, you've got no ambition, you're talking too much and too loudly, you've nothing to say, you're a bimbo, too smart, too assertive, a doormat, behaving too much like a man, you're a typical woman. In short, there are no "fine lines" here: achieving acceptable womanhood isn't a balancing act, it's impossible. Logically  imp...

There are some dicey moments in the second of  Stieg Larsson 's ' Millennium Trilogy ' crime thrillers. The one that really  got me was when his arguably- too -brilliant social-misfit-hacker protagonist Lisbeth Salander   finally  (after several weeks of intermittent, amateur endeavour) solves the riddle of Fermat's Last Theorem  -- a conjecture which famously remained unproven for 358 years after the tantalising claim by the eponymous theorist , scrawled in the white space of his copy of the ancient Greek mathematical text Arithmetica , that he knew a proof but that it was too large to fit in the margin. Salander began her advance towards the house, moving in a circle through the woods. She had gone about a hundred and fifty metres when suddenly she stopped in mid-stride.  In the margin of his copy of Arithmetica, Pierre de Fermat had jotted the words I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow ...