Shaking A Leg

It is her journalism, collected in the 1997 volume 'Shaking a Leg', to which I find myself returning again and again, struck freshly by its forthrightness, its imagination, its unpredictability - and by the sheer range of subjects on which she was fluent

Susannah Clapp, Guardian

Incisive cultural journalism by the British novelist that among other delicious subversions invokes the Greeks to argue for wearing high heels with long skirts

New York Times

Shocking, willful, extravagant - every cut and quip at the same time reveals a striking intellectual acuity

New York Times

This collection is a must... The writing is trenchant, acerbic, witty, probing, and often critically subtle

Booklist

The range of her interests is quite dazzling. She is the voice of an entire generation

Washington Post

These essays on culture and society first appeared from the Sixties to the Eighties: together, they prove that the despised press could breed the best in post-war thinking and writing; and that, in an age of woozy fantasy, witty rationality could still prevail

Independent

Reading Shaking a Leg is like sitting down with a friend who is clever, funny, outrageous, compassionate, anecdotal and sociologically aware; someone with a great memory and a quirky, associative train of thought; someone who can make you laugh and say "yes" out loud before you turn the page to devour her next paragraph, whether it be about Hollywood or Venice, her dotty parents or her favourite writers. Carter is endlessly entertaining, endearing and down-to-earth in this admirably comprehensive collection

Irish Times

Some of her best, wittiest writing is here...Shaking a Leg contains some of the best essays since Orwell

Independent

Shaking a Leg...explains what makes her a great and indispensable talent...there's the gold she left behind in this book, a treasury of her life and art and thought

Independent on Sunday

A treasure trove...You quickly start needing to read bits out to people...For one thing she's extremely funny: for another, she's cantankerous as hell, with a bullshit antenna of NASA-engineered proportions...Stunning, an inspiring, delightful breath of air

Time Out

Shaking a Leg is packed with deliciously tongue-in-cheek wit about the everyday world of the 1970s and 1980s. She is mistress of the arresting opening and the bathetic end

The Times

Shaking a Leg reveals a stunning range of interests that marks her out not just as one of our greatest novelists and short story writers but as one of our best literary and cultural critics... If you would like better to understand the workings of the second half of our century, then this is the book

Ali Smith, Scotsman