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The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 581 Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mary-Kay Wilmers, who retired as editor of the LRB last month, talks to Andrew O’Hagan about her career, first at Faber and Faber, then the Listener, then for 42 years at the London Review of Books. She talks about working with T.S. Eliot, the importance of being teased, and how a joke by Alan Bennett changed her life. The episode also contains extracts from Wilmers’s 1988 diary for the LRB, ‘Putting in the Commas’, and O’Hagan’s piece about Wilmers in the latest issue of the paper. Read and listen to them in full here: Mary-Kay Wilmers: Putting in the Commas Andrew O'Hagan: Miss Skippit Subscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue: https://mylrb.co.uk/podcast20b Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you enjoy listening to the LRB podcast, then you'll probably enjoy reading the LRB.
0:06.1	You can subscribe to the LRB from just one pound per issue.
0:10.7	To find out more, go to LRB.m.me forward slash listen.
0:16.1	That's LRB.m.m.
0:18.8	Forward slash listen.
0:23.8	Or click on the link in the description below this episode.
0:30.5	Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. This week, Mary Kay Wilmers is in conversation with Andrew O'Hagan, one of the founding editors of the LRB in 1979 and its sole editor for 30 years.
0:39.2	Mary Kay Wilmer is now the paper's consulting editor. Her pieces were recently collected as human
0:45.0	relations and other difficulties. Andrew O'Hagan, the LRB's editor at large, is now probably
0:51.5	best known as the author of several prize-winning novels.
0:55.0	But he was an unpublished assistant editor at the LRB when, in 1993,
0:59.9	Mary Kay asked him to write a diary about the James Bulger case,
1:03.1	which catapulted him to instant fame or notoriety.
1:07.0	He has written about Mary Kaye in the latest issue of the paper,
1:10.1	and before we get to their discussion, we'll hear him reading a bit from his piece about her.
1:15.0	The other day, I was talking to a man who was one's head of an Oxford college. He recalled an occasion in the late 1950s when he was a student himself, and Kingsley Amos had come to address his college's literary society.
1:29.7	When Amos eventually asked for questions, a young woman said something that came as a surprise.
1:36.3	Can you give us your sex life in ancient Rome face? she asked. Jim Dixon, the hero of Lucky Jim, is keen on making faces and is stumped at the end of the book because he is more or less happy. And so, as a kind of token, he made his sex life in ancient Rome face. Amos, suddenly confused, didn't quite know what to say, and the audience laughed. The young woman
2:04.8	was Mary Kay Wilmers. After working at Faber and Faber, the listener and the TLS, she became one of the
2:12.4	founders of this paper in 1979 and has just retired after more than 30 years as its editor.
2:20.8	I wanted to begin with one of her jokes, an early one,
2:24.8	because her gift for amusement has always been there,
	...

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