Search Results

“... who wrote as Alice Thomas Ellis. Their work had little to do with the great social explorations of Doris Lessing or with the ludic excavations of Angela Carter. Or with Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez or Kingsley Amis. What now seems striking is how utterly beyond this Bainbridge was. If she is to be seen as part of any tradition it is one that is ...”

“... copies at Gaston’s in Chancery Lane for half the published price.At one of these parties I saw Doris Lessing – hair in a bun, shapeless dress, clunky shoes – frowning as she walked without hesitation across the room and introduced herself to Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... after a Fire Raid’ must first appear as part of a socialist Mayday feature in 1944. Doris Lessing, so she now claims, grew hysterical; Clough, who briefly belonged to Jimmy Maxton’s Independent Labour Party, mostly agitated for a revolutionary concept of community and building so that people could inhabit both and be at ease with ...”

“... 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 ...”