Why women are ruthless

Women can get away with this in ways that men would never be allowed to. When a woman pokes fun at her man or even soundly debases him, the group surrounding them is more likely to laugh than to be appalled. When you finally get to the point when you feel you can safely ask for her number, she smiles and says: "I have a boyfriend. This is a time-tested, and frequently used, cruel thing for women to do to men.

For most men, sex is as important as breathing, so withholding it in order to get something she wants or simply to punish her man for his transgressions is a pretty awful thing to do, even if it is effective. This kind of testing in a relationship is indeed cruel and petty. For whatever reason, girls who flirt obviously with other guys in front of their boyfriends are immature and manipulative.

On a beautiful private island off the coast of the UK, the cast and crew of glamorous TV show Falcon Bay are at breaking point. Ratings are falling, and their new boss is inventing ever more dramatic — and impossible — storylines to get Falcon Bay back into the number 1 slot.

Director Farrah, lead actress Catherine and producer Amanda are the passionate, ambitious women holding the show together. With so much at stake, they will stop at nothing to stay in the jobs they love and on the island they call home. Can these women team up to bring down their rivals? Or will scandal, betrayal and ambition tear them apart?

Each character is perfectly crafted The must-read novel of the year' OK! A shockingly good read' SUN. Suspense soaked in glamour. Beautifully written [ Trade Paperback. A shockingly good read' SUN 'I'm obsessed with this book Glamorous women, hunky men, mendacious producers, insecure actors and people stabbing each other in the front, back and side'.

Softness has been cut out like diseased tissue. I do not wish to imply that every powerful woman is like this. Most are not. The Medea woman is an archetype - a case study in extremism, one that terrifies men and hypnotises women.

How far could we go? How far would we push others? What means would become acceptable, natural even, in the pursuit of our ambition? Medea lives on humanity's rim. She is not dehumanised, and we should not think of her as inhuman. That word escapes responsibility - whatever humans do is human.

A Medea type forces us to travel to the edges of ourselves, away from the comfortable middle ground most of us occupy. In real life, reading about Archer or Hamilton, we laugh or blame or recoil, but it would be better to focus, better to ask the difficult questions of ourselves. Part of the lure of Archer and Hamilton is that neither woman recognises any separation between real and imagined worlds. The only world they recognise is their own world - self-invented and self-justifying, outside of which there is no truth.

I doubt that Mary Archer thinks of herself as a liar, and I believe her when she says she believes her husband to be truthful in the important things.