“... There is, it must be said, no easy formula for writing a successful way-we-live-now novel. Doris Lessing offers one of the main precedents for a book like The Radiant Way, but her realistic chronicle-novels, such as The Four-Gated City, have not worn as well as most readers expected they would. (And this despite the fact that ...”

“... for good writing, Gerhardie finds no place in syllabuses which find room for, say, Vonnegut or Doris Lessing. Since Henry Green, arguably the best English novelist of his time, is little better off, we need not waste our time being surprised at this neglect. It would be agreeable to believe that the present stir of interest might alter the ...”

“... largely, I think, about how I wasn’t being a writer, my previously adoptive or foster mother, Doris Lessing, would say, in her matter of fact, impatient way: ‘Well, just write down your life story. It’s interesting enough, and there are editors who can deal with sorting out your sentences and that kind of thing.’ She wafted her arm in the air ...”

“... Authors who drew most attention to their own form and language – novelists such as John Berger, Doris Lessing, or Rushdie himself; poets such as J.H. Prynne – were in this way among the most politically committed in the period. Stevenson’s prejudices are strongly aired in his chapters on poetry. He is less at ease discussing verse than he is ...”

“... as ‘Saul Green’, he even found his way into one of his era’s major works of fiction, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. On his first night in London, Sigal, an illegal immigrant, slept in Trafalgar Square, where ‘yobbos in thick-soled boots kicked the crap out of me.’ After a time of sleeping rough, looking to rent a room, Clancy ...”

“... judgment too. After a wearily lucid analysis of the Women’s Movement and a precise appraisal of Doris Lessing, Miss Didion moves on to a bizarre hymn to Georgia O’Keeffe, the veteran American painter. Miss Didion makes the mistake, at the outset, of taking along her seven-year-old daughter to see a Chicago retrospective of the painter’s work: One ...”

“... So into the witness-box come successively Edna O’Brien, Margaret Drabble, Penelope Mortimer, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch. In the case of three, perhaps four, of the witnesses nothing is said about how they give their evidence. In the two years that Rebecca West was contributing to the Clarion, 1912 and 1913, she seldom wrote about books and so had ...”

“... ancestors, from 17th-century and Romantic poetry to the fiction of near contemporaries such as Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch. And even on occasions when the Potter novels don’t ‘get up and walk’ – which they mostly do, with considerable energy – they are always acutely intelligent about their lineage. Byatt has implied that she did not at ...”

“... coat, black stockings and high heels touchingly comic. Pym valiantly kept up with new writers: Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Sylvia Plath, Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs. A James Baldwin novel, she wrote to Larkin, quoting the publishers’ blurb, was indeed ‘powerful’. She thought it ‘a very well-written book, but so upsetting – one ...”

“... out of duty. When it comes to postwar women writers, I would much rather read Beauvoir, McCarthy, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and Natalia Ginzburg. Paradoxically, Jefferson’s biography enabled me to see the anti-biography Sarraute as a unique voice rather than a member of a well-studied movement.My own literary sensibility has also changed. The last ...”

“... else on the Library’s list. Novelists with clear literary pedigrees now write SF regularly: Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Kazuo Ishiguro. Authors who began inside the SF ghetto have found success outside it: J.G. Ballard as an author of realist novels, Samuel Delany in academia, William Gibson, Lethem himself (whose first books ...”

“... good. And yet his novels have survived, thanks to the efforts of such admirers as J.B. Priestley, Doris Lessing and Michael Holroyd, and to the biographical enterprise set in train by his older brother, Bruce, whose memoir of Patrick, The Light Went Out (1972), prompted the first Hamilton mini-revival. Bruce was upfront about his brother’s ...”

“... libraries. It was a broad collective, with more than five hundred members by 1974, including Doris Lessing, Raymond Williams, Anthony Burgess, B.S. Johnson, Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, Kingsley Amis and the adamantine Murdoch. In 1979, the Public Lending Right was passed by Parliament (today, authors receive around 9.55p per loan, capped at £6,600 a ...”

“... Wright’s appraisal of the post-colonial condition was full of suggestive ambiguities. As Doris Lessing recognised, this ambivalence was an expression of lucidity – and courage. Wright’s trilogy of books about decolonisation was the great achievement of his last decade, but to his contemporaries, especially his black contemporaries, his ...”

“... to meet people, make connections; to enter into a literary life. She reached out to writers like Doris Lessing, who rebuffed her, and wrote a fan letter to Stevie Smith, which is excerpted on the back of Smith’s magnificent All the Poems. ‘I am a desperate Stevie Smith addict,’ the blurb reads. Then you open up the collection to find ...”