The psychologist, trustee of Alzheimer’s charity SPECAL and bestselling author chooses FiveBooks on the mad world we live in and says British and American women today are five times more likely to be mentally ill than women in the 1950s. Thatcherism and Reaganomics smashed the family to pieces.
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Meg Rosoff studied at Harvard University and at Central St Martins in London. She started writing novels after a career in advertising. Her first book, How I Live Now, won The Guardian Award (2004), Michael L Printz Award (2005), Branford Boase Award (2005) and was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread Awards in the children’s book category. She has written a further three novels for young adults, as well as two books for children.
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An MP since 1987, Ann Widdecombe was Minister for Prisons under John Major from 1995 to 1997. Following the Conservative defeat she served as Shadow Health Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary under William Hague. In 2001 she retired from frontbench politics in order to express herself more freely on issues that mattered to her. Her first novel, The Clematis Tree, published in April 2000, became a bestseller. Since then she has written a further three novels. She is currently a weekly columnist for the Daily Express and is in the process of writing a prequel to An Act of Treachery.
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Sue Palmer writes about child development and education in the modern world. She’s listed among the 20 most influential figures in English education by the London Evening Standard. She lives in Scotland, where she was recently described in The Scotsman as one of the country’s “new radical thinkers”. Sue Palmer talks to FiveBooks about why modern life is making boys more sad, isolated and materialistic.
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Professor Vivette Glover is Professor of Perinatal Psychobiology at Imperial College London. In 1997 she set up the Fetal and Neonatal Stress Research Group, to study fetal and neonatal stress responses, methods to reduce them, and their long term effects. Vivette has published over 400 papers, she takes a break to tell FiveBooks how maternal stress adversely effects fetal development, and expalin that a fetus under 13 weeks is unlikely to feel pain.
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