The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2019
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How self-revealing and frank should a writer be? Lara Feigel, David Aaronovitch, Melissa Benn and Xiaolu Guo join Matthew Sweet to look at the life of Doris Lessing and her 1962 novel in which she explores difficult love, life, war, politics and dreams.
Inspired by her re-reading of Doris Lessing, Lara Feigel has written a revealing book which is part memoir part biography called "Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing". It is out in paperback. Melissa Benn's books include Mother and Child, One of Us and School Wars David Aaronovitch is the author of Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists and a former winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Journalism. Xiaolu Guo has written a memoir Once Upon a Time in the East, and novels including UFO in Her Eyes, and Lovers In the Age of Indifference.
Producer: Fiona McLean
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's |
| 0:27.5 | out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:36.8 | So, you've succumbed. |
| 0:38.7 | You heard the Arts and Ideas podcast calling to you, like that pie in the fridge. |
| 0:44.2 | Well, my name's Matthew Sweet, and I'm here to tell you that really there's no need to feel guilty. |
| 0:49.9 | Give in to your desires. |
| 0:51.5 | We all need ideas. |
| 0:52.9 | We all need the arts. And you're going to get them |
| 0:55.7 | right here, right now, after this short message. Hello, just butting in. I'm Eleanor Rosamond |
| 1:03.7 | Baraklough and I'm here to tell you about time travellers, the BBC Radio 3 podcast that's |
| 1:09.7 | packed full of quirky stories from the corners of |
| 1:12.5 | history. If you'd like to know how a polar bear ended up catching its dinner in the Thames, |
| 1:18.2 | why Poldark was much loved in post-fascist Spain, what happens if you give a spider too much |
| 1:24.2 | caffeine, how the suffragettes weaponised roller skating and what any of this |
| 1:29.2 | has to do with anything, then you'll have to subscribe to the Time Travelers podcast. Find us on BBC |
| 1:36.0 | Sounds. The point is everything's cracking up. We're told that at the start of The Golden Notebook, |
| 1:47.4 | a novel that seems built to speed the cracking up process, a novel of house brick-like window-smashing heft. |
| 1:55.0 | What kind of everything? Well, women, men, the family, marriage, communism, colonialism, the narrator and the novel itself. |
| 2:03.7 | We are, said its author, the Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, living in the middle of a whirlwind. |
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