By Christina Patterson

The Clothes on Their Backs, just longlisted for the Booker, starts with the transforming power of a dress and ends with a jacket, a skirt and a pair of shoes. To say it's about clothes, however, would be a bit like saying that King Lear is about the monarchy. As a journalist, Linda Grant is well known for her love for fashion and fashion certainly features in this novel: the dapper suits of a spiv-cum-showman, the impeccable outfits of his glamorous shopgirl girlfriend, the punk/vintage ensembles of a 70s teenager and the tight jeans, leather jackets and shaved heads of a burgeoning National Front.

By Christina Patterson

If you get raped, make sure it’s by a millionaire. That, at least, is the lesson you might draw from last week’s ruling that a 79-year old retired teacher should be paid compensation by Lotto millionaire, Iorworth Hoare.

By Christina Patterson

Clearly, we can’t yet know whether Lee Jasper has, as alleged in the Standard over the past couple of weeks, been responsible for cronyism on a breathtaking scale - but it’s certainly not looking good. And if the array of witnesses that Andrew Gilligan has assembled in what appears to be an impressively detailed piece of investigative journalism are to be believed, Jasper is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, with fingers in lots of pies – and one whose mechanisms for ensuring that the pies stay sweet draw heavily on the standard tactics of the playground bully.

The whole situation raises so many questions that it’s hard to know where to start. Why on earth has Ken been so reliant on such a man? What hold does Jasper have over him? And why is the nexus of “black” organisations ostensibly in a position to supply training programmes so tiny and apparently corrupt? Is London, a city with the largest black population in Europe, really so short of competent black managers that it has to rely on backhanders to mates? If, 60 years after the Windrush first arrived on these shores, that’s really the case then we should, as a society, be ashamed. If it isn’t – if there are plenty but Jasper and the LDA have chosen to ignore them – then he should, and so should Ken. Apologies for slavery are all very well, but sometimes the problems are closer to home.

By Christina Patterson

Passions blazed at the RSA this week in an Evening Standard debate on ‘Is Islam Good for London?’ It was, of course, fairly easy to spot the Muslim women in the audience – due to a certain item of clothing which, as always, fuelled heated discussions. "Why, as women, should we be at fault or responsible for the feelings of men?" demanded Joan Smith. "To wear a hijab is literally to wear a veil and why should women feel like they have to be veiled in public?"