Thank you to everyone who sent messages of congratulations to Maggie. I've passed them on. People are always intrigued by success, so from my privileged vantage point, I can now offer an insider guide to what you have to do to win the Women’s Prize for fiction. The secret is ... ... that you have to work and work, year in year out, honing your craft, ignoring the fact that for the first decade most reviewers are incapable of praising your books without expressing surprise that a young female writer has written something that isn’t "chick-lit” ...

Some thoughts for a new year on why social media is often depressing, and how to live a better life. In the digital world, where we are all producers and consumers of that most prized 21st century commodity, attention, it has become difficult to distinguish work from leisure. 1 While becoming more distractible, we've become acquisitive of attention, wanting to receive but not give it. The attention economy of social media often feels like a pyramid scheme in which the majority of us are at the bottom, gazing enviously at those who inhabit the summit. 2

I've always felt Corbyn is maligned by the mainstream media, so I went to this - to hear him speak in a non-confrontational setting. What I learned is that he is flat, uninspiring, repetitive, dreary, inarticulate and vague. Bitterly disappointing and enraging. In response to almost every question, the needle fell into the same groove about inequality. No vision or broad view of complex issues. He claimed to be anti-Brexit, but I got the feeling he would have said the opposite if the event had been in Sunderland.