A personal perspective on Ghislaine Maxwell offers an empathetic telling of a horrific story

It’s not often a book reverberates around my head for days. But there is something brilliantly unsettling about this account of the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite jailed for procuring young girls for the billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Having watched from the press box as the case descended into a media circus, Lucia Osborne-Crowley begins by promising to put the victims back at the heart of the story, tracing the impact of the abuse they suffered as children through to their middle-aged lives. But it soon emerges that this book isn’t just about the vulnerable teenagers Maxwell and Epstein groomed for sexual entertainment, exploiting their desperation for affection or for money. It’s also about the author and, less comfortably, the reader too.

A paralegal turned freelance journalist, Osborne-Crowley was abused herself from the age of nine by a non-family member, then violently raped at 15 by a stranger (something she has written about extensively in two previous books). She makes no pretence at journalistic distance from her subject, but instead a virtue out of being almost too close to it: less objective narrator than increasingly traumatised participant. At first, I find her habit of constantly inserting herself into a story supposedly centring other victims faintly irritating. By the end, I’m converted. By interweaving her own insights with those of the Maxwell victims she interviews, she forms the bigger picture.

In league with regional mayors, the prime minister can test good ideas in areas like housing. There is promising talent in Labour’s ranks too. Fast track it

It was just before breakfast, at a leisure centre in Norfolk, that this particular era of Conservatism came to an end. A white-faced Liz Truss left the stage without a word, after losing her supposedly impregnable seat to Labour.

Though Keir Starmer had effectively won the election some hours before, this was middle England’s final, cleansing act of revenge against the former prime minister most strongly associated – admittedly against stiff competition from her predecessor – with that particular strain of blithe incompetence that has ruined lives for too long. Justice was done. It felt less like an election than a miraculously bloodless revolution.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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By 2021, women around the world were 6% angrier than men, a gap that widened during the pandemic. Dr Jennifer Cox says it is time to let it all out

“Oh my God, I love a scream,” says Dr Jennifer Cox, her face lighting up. “Screaming underwater, I recommend. It’s amazing. It’s so liberating and no one can hear.”

The same is true for standing on a motorway bridge and venting your pent-up rage and frustration into the roar of the traffic underneath. Or, at a pinch, for yelling under the noise of the shower, she says. “Women are like: ‘Oh, I can’t be seen to do this stuff.’ OK, don’t be seen. But let it out.”