Too many of our children are battling severe depression

Christopher Hitchens once said that women just aren’t as funny as men and Caitlin Moran believed him. But that was many years ago — the great male essayist and orator has been dead for a decade — and Moran has matured into a bold, wise, middle-aged comedienne. When she was growing up in the 1980s, funny women such as Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr and Victoria Wood ‘were rare and regarded as a freak of nature’. With retrospect, Moran realises that ‘Hitchens and I were, respectively, too male, or too young to have ever been invited into a coven — of which there are millions across the world’.

Moran’s new book is dedicated to her coven, also known as Team Tits. A coven is a place

where middle-aged women withdraw from the world to be with those who have, like them, gone through abortion, death, miscarriage, nervous breakdowns, funerals, unemployment, poverty, fear, hospital appointments and broken hearts – where they sometimes weep and comfort each other, but more often make jokes so pitch black they can only be laughed at by a fellow Hag.