Blood is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood... there are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them!

The software program for motherhood is impossible to fully download into the male brain. You give them two tasks and they're like, 'I have to change the baby and get the dry cleaning?'

I don't believe for a minute that women really want to be understood by men.

My child was one of Nature's Tories pitted against a mother who was one of nurture's Lefties: it was no contest.

For centuries, the question of men needing to comprehend women simply didn't arise. Men were valued according to how they measured up to the manly virtues.

My husband is old-fashioned and kind, he does the greatest Sinatra impression, and I'd never have written anything if he hadn't read all those bedtime stories and unloaded the dishwasher while I slaved over chapters.

My ideals told me that men and women could both go out to work and be truly equal. My children told me something more complicated, something I really didn't want to hear. Their need for me was like the need for water or light: it had a devastating simplicity to it.

My mother was a stay-at-home mom until I was about 11, when she got a job - and it was like a light came on inside her. It's not wrong to be passionate about your career. When you love what you do, you bring that stimulation back to your family.

When you have kids, there's a tendency to put the marriage stew on the back burner and give it a quick stir now and then. But it's important to remember why you had children with this person.

Women now influence the majority of consumer purchases. It is women's votes that will secure victory at the next election, hence the altogether delicious spectacle of Messrs Brown and Cameron vying to tell stories about broken nights and childcare as men once boasted of goals scored or pheasants bagged.

Women run the small country called Home, millions of us do it in our spare time, and no one who doesn't run that small country really knows what it feels like in the dead of night when task lists jitter like tickertape through your seething brain.

Working mothers' laughter comes hardest when our double life is revealed for what it is: a juggling act in which the balls can drop at any time, invariably on our own head.