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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for the spectator.

This week I'm very pleased to be joined by the writer and critic Victoria Smith, who's known to those of you on social media under her Twitter handle at Gloss Witch,

and whose new book is Hags, the Demonisation of Middle-aged women. Victoria, welcome.

Thank you. Now, this is a book that describes, at least in part, a very, very old phenomenon, but I'm

wondering what it is to you that made it a book that was urgent to write now. What's the new

twist, if you like, on the old story of witches and hags and skulls and gossips?

I suppose the thing that made it particularly urgent to me was I'd not been a middle-aged

woman before, so I'd kind of viewed it

from a particular way when I was younger. And then suddenly, when you get there, all these

kind of stereotypes and these images, suddenly you're seeing them from the other side and thinking,

oh, gosh, that's what it was like. But then at the same time, I think one of the things that

made me particularly concerned about it,

I mean, I started thinking about it a few years ago, just when Karen was becoming really popular

as an insult for particularly middle-aged white women and the way in which it was being used,

not just to call out racism or to call out bad behavior, but just to suggest that they were too loud and too entitled and too bossy.

And a lot of this was being framed as a kind of intersectional feminist critique

that actually it wasn't misogyny.

It was actually feminism to kind of attack older women

...