Aoife Clifford

It's a fictional version of the life of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Lawyer, policy wonk, presidential candidate.

And it follows reality to a certain degree and then it takes a big right-hand turn.

Or is that left-hand turn?

So Nicole, Nicole Aberdee, let's begin with the real section.

So we meet Hilary in 1970 at uni and she's quite a cool cat.

So Hillary sees him, as you said, like a lion, sort of big in stature and lion-like.

And I was thinking of Aslan from the Narnia books.

But it turns out that Bill has a preconception about Hillary.

And that's because a year earlier, before they kind of get into their romantic entanglement, his mother had clipped an article out of Life magazine about her and sent it to him in Oxford saying that she was one of the smartest people around.

So he already knew that she was an incredibly dynamite thinker.

Now, that's really interesting, Simon, because as I was reading it, I was thinking, gosh, if I'd ever read a biography or autobiography of Hillary Clinton's, I would know where to place this as a piece of writing.

But because I haven't, I didn't know whether it was being fresh or a bit tongue in cheek or caricature-ish of them.

What did you see?

It's one of the great American stories of our times, Bill and Hillary, perhaps along with Brad and Angelina Jolie and Beyonce and Jay-Z, maybe even Obama.

John and Jackie?

John and Jackie, and maybe even President Trump and Melania.

But what is at the heart of the Bill and Hillary story is he's one of the great feminist thinkers who had to stand by her man.

And it was that humiliation, which is then repeated by her loss of the presidential race to Donald Trump, which is another humiliation she experienced.

But it's that that makes me think this is a kind of piece of wish fulfilment, like the way Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Bastards was a kind of revenge fantasy rewriting the Nazi disaster, the Holocaust, for a kind of, yeah, it was like wish fulfilment.