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slash radio four. Hello, welcome with me today. Shirley Williams, one-time member of both the Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments, founding member and first president of the breakaway SDP, and strong supporter of that party's merger with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats,

and she remains an active member of the House of Lords.

With Shirley Williams Margaret Drabble, whose 18 novels include a summer birdcage, the millstone, and most recently the pure gold baby.

Her 19th The Dark Flood Rises, comes out next year.

Terrific title, Margaret. But we're not talking today about what you've written, but what you've read.

What is your choice of a good read? My choice for a good read is Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel,

The Group, which I read when it first came out and absolutely loved.

It's set in the 1930s and it's about a group of Vassar girls privileged, not all as

privileged as each other, but very clever intellectual girls living through their years

immediately after graduation.

And it's just a wonderful social document.

It's full of recipe.

I loved it because I myself was newly married,

and it's all about birth control, babies, recipes, fashion, decor,

ideas, Nietzsche, Kraft Ebbing, Freud.

It is the most wonderfully entertaining novel.

Recrethism, Craft Ebing.

You weren't only newly married.

You were also newly writing.

I mean, your first novel was published in the same year as the group was published.

Did you also devour it as a writer as some kind of inspiration or not?

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