Joan Smith

Known for her human rights activism and writing on subjects such as atheism and feminism, Joan Smith is a columnist, critic and novelist. An Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a regular contributor to BBC radio, she has written five detective novels, two of which have been filmed by the BBC. Her latest novel, What Will Survive, was published in June 2007.

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Assange cares for no one but himself

Joan Smith: Neither whistleblower nor journalist, the hacker is a menace.

Recently by Joan Smith

Joan Smith: Casino banking does more damage than riots

Sunday, 18 September 2011

Another week, another banking scandal: on Friday, a day after the Swiss bank UBS announced it had lost the staggering sum of £1.3bn, one of its star traders appeared in court charged with fraud and false accounting. The hugely embarrassing announcement from UBS came three years to the day since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, suggesting not much has changed in the high-risk world of casino capitalism.

Joan Smith: It's the aristo that was the Bard – or maybe the giant lizard

Sunday, 4 September 2011

Poor old William Shakespeare hasn't had much luck in movies. He didn't get his girl in the truly appalling Shakespeare in Love, and now he's about to be accused of not writing his own plays in a new Hollywood film.

Joan Smith: What if women paid less tax?

Thursday, 1 September 2011

There is an unacknowledged 'woman tax'. Attitudes are shaped by prejudice about men as breadwinners

Joan Smith: For bad taste you can't beat a dictator

Sunday, 28 August 2011

The closest I've come to a Kalashnikov was when someone presented me with a glass replica of an AK-47 filled with vodka. It's the kind of thing a dictator might like to display on his sideboard but I couldn't help thinking there were far too many genuine AK-47s in Tripoli last week, even as jubilant rebels wandered awe-struck through the opulent villas of Colonel Gaddafi's eight children. One young man from Misrata stripped to a pair of shorts and launched a yellow kayak into a swimming pool belonging to Hannibal Gaddafi, who beat up his pregnant girlfriend in Paris in 2005, but he didn't let go of his rifle as he grinned for the camera.

Why rape victims must have flawless pasts to get justice

Wednesday, 24 August 2011

Joan Smith: Predators often select 'vulnerable' women who are likely to be less convincing witnesses.

Let's dare to denounce dangerous trash

Sunday, 21 August 2011

Joan Smith: Fear of siding with the right against a corrosive celebrity culture forces liberal thinkers to tolerate questionable values.

A-level results that should shock us

Friday, 19 August 2011

Joan Smith: Pupils at private schools, which educate only 6.5 per cent of children, achieved 30 per cent of A* grades this year.

Joan Smith: Lack of empathy made it easier to wreck and rob

Sunday, 14 August 2011

Mix violent street disturbances, excitable commentators, angry politicians and "experts" on youth culture and what do you get? Hot air. It is perfectly possible to be horrified by last week's riots without rushing into a moral panic or claiming that they fulfil doomy predictions about the impact of spending cuts. But it is vital to identify the causes, because the response of national politicians, local councils and schools will be shaped by assumptions about why the violence happened. Yet much of what has been said in the past few days has been irrelevant for a simple reason: mobs are not driven by reason.