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“... better known. Nervous Conditions has had many admirers, including Chinua Achebe, Alice Walker and Doris Lessing, who called it ‘the novel we have all been waiting for’. The first sentence is irresistible: ‘I was not sorry when my brother died.’ But Dangarembga spent four years trying to find a publisher for it and succeeded only by looking beyond ...”

“... heaven itself, on the Bellingen River, this church has been carted away. It was not of any use.’ Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child is chilly and disconcerting: told with the cool blandness of a folk tale, a horror story, it offers us, in the end, neither explanation nor comfort. Harriet and David are a very ordinary couple growing up in the ...”

“... with the heavily worked, tarred and concreted land surface we occupy today. In African Laughter Doris Lessing presents a poignant picture of the Southern Rhodesian bush as it was in the Twenties and Thirties compared with the Zimbabwe countryside today. The population has shot up, a far greater acreage is farmed. The wild animals have gone: The bush ...”

“... Maniototo, has as many affinities with the work of the Latin American fabulists or with that of Doris Lessing as it does with her own early works. In the first volume of her autobiography, To the Is-Land, Frame combines an evocative and clear-sighted account of growing up in small-town New Zealand with a self-conscious sub-plot which offers an ...”

“... Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bowen, Marguerite Duras, Martha Gellhorn, Natalia Ginzburg, Shirley Hazzard, Doris Lessing and many other women writers are here (but not Anne Frank or Hannah Arendt), and among the more unexpected selections are the reminiscences of Soviet women, collected, Studs Terkel-wise, by Julia Voznesenskaya. The reaction to The Naked and the ...”

“... D.H. Lawrence, and he was acclaimed by (among others) Ford Madox Ford, Malcolm Cowley and, later, Doris Lessing. Though his most productive decade was the 1920s, and he was well enough known by 1931 for a bibliography of his work to be published (with interjections from himself and blank pages at the back for readers to note down ‘future ...”

“... checks. It’s a constant whine, like the endless bleating of white Rhodesian peasants reported by Doris Lessing and called by her ‘the conversation’. The country is going to the dawgs/to hell on a sled/to hell in a handcart. The pointy-heads and the desk-job white-collar drones are responsible. At different pitches and with different timbres, this ...”

“... of such writers as Richardson, Rebecca West, Alexandra Kollontai, Christina Stead, Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, Miller’s deliberately unsystematic readings have an impressive cumulative power. By the end of the book, as she discusses the work of black and working-class writers, women who have been so excluded from the ...”

“... Publisher charmingly. Maschler quotes at length from such clients as Dahl, Vonnegut and Doris Lessing, who, if their words are to be believed, clearly care about Maschler (Jeffrey Archer one is less sure about). Writing to the Guardian to protest against the concerted ‘nastiness’ of the reviewers, Arnold Wesker recorded how helpful and ...”

“... interesting, and allies McCarthy with all sorts of other writers and critics – Raymond Williams, Doris Lessing and (perhaps most suggestively) Iris Murdoch – who were all talking about something similar at the same time. You can describe it in many different ways, but it comes down to the disintegration of the representative function of fiction, as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... under way: American intellectuals propose space colonies to keep the race alive, and in England Doris Lessing also seems to have gone galactic, or at least inter-planetary. The Home Office, for its part, still promises survival for the homely. In view of all this, one is tempted to proscribe any further dealings with one’s apocalyptic self, for fear ...”

“... scale. Flora Scheiber’s book Sybil (1973) is about a woman with 16 distinct personalities, and Doris Lessing felt it forced you ‘to look at yourself and the people around you in a new way’, as well it might. William James and Weir Mitchell, who looked after Edith Wharton during a breakdown, had earlier investigated the multiple self, or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... huge, shaggy, romantic figure who roused hopeless adolescent passion in the breast of the teenage Doris Lessing, as she described in her memoirs long afterwards: ‘He was famous for his oratory. He was famous for his love affairs, possibly because he wrote poems not unlike Rupert Brooke’s, and a good many were love poems. Very handsome he was, like a ...”