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“... Pass’; ‘Is Anyone Surprised?’ It’s essentially the same story that ran in 1984, when Doris Lessing wrote two novels under pseudonyms to make the point that no one would notice them. Or last year, when the Sunday Times sent 20 literary agents chapters from old novels by V.S. Naipaul and Stanley Middleton. Cue outrage, embarrassment, ‘we ...”

“... A few​ years ago, someone asked how it came about that I ended up living with Doris Lessing in my teens. I was in the middle of the story of the to-ing and fro-ing between my parents and was finally reaching the psychiatric hospital bit when the man said something extraordinary, something that had never occurred to me or to anyone else to whom I’d told the story ...”

“... the recent pieces about my cancer or my memories of my teenage years and my relationship with Doris Lessing, my older books, fiction and non-fiction, something they’ve read or remembered. They’re remarkably kind (my paranoia wonders, but I fight back the idea that the LRB’s editors hold on to the ones that are not so positive). They are well ...”

“... Peter Lessing​ died in his flat, of a heart attack, in the early hours of 13 October 2013, aged 66. His mother, Doris Lessing, died four weeks later, on 17 November 2013, aged 94, in the adjoining house. An interconnecting door had been cut into the shared wall and was always left open ...”

“... of essays on some of the novelists who have come to prominence since the Fifties: B.S. Johnson, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess, V.S. Naipaul. The list is not intended to identify a new pantheon, nor meant to be exclusive. Most of the essays were occasional pieces written over the last decade. But they do, individually and ...”

“... the famous: Edna O’Brien, among others, found it ‘disturbing and quite fascinating’, and Doris Lessing ‘a valuable book, an original’. It is a pity it comes in the kind of packaging that will repel the averagely fastidious reader. Duckworth have printed it in type about one size smaller than that of a Janet and John reader, and sub-titled it ...”

“... within a month of each other, neither of them really unexpected after years of frailty, but both, Doris Lessing and her son, Peter, having attachments of some complexity to each other, to my daughter and to me, going back even before I went at 15 to live in their house. When she died last November at the age of 94, I’d known ...”

“... exile, emigration and the free movement of ideas, so that Rushdie and Henry James are in, as are Doris Lessing and Vikram Seth. But Bradbury is remarkably ambivalent about at least one novelist who might be hospitably claimed as a modern British master – V.S. Naipaul, who is briefly referred to as ‘the Trinidadian novelist’. This might place him ...”

“... we are reminded that values do not become impregnable because they have been embodied in rhetoric. Doris Lessing has chosen to make a courageous change in direction, towards political satire, in her Canopus in Argos series, which is ostensibly Science Fiction, but reveals itself all too clearly as an allegory of our own sublunary sphere. The names may at ...”

“... for the press corps, whose nature is to sting, and toss off an informed reference to Doris Lessing. In the first half of the book, which follows the New Hampshire primary, those in the know have been impressed by the accuracy or verisimilitude of the information, the wicked caricatures of recognisable players from James Carville (the ...”

“... one Australian (Patrick White), one Canadian (Morley Callaghan) and one Southern African (Doris Lessing). Of these four writers, three are at least as well-known for their novels as for their stories. Since this review is being written in Australia, I should report that for the occasion I have conscientiously perused The Penguin Book of ...”

“... of his daughter’s intellectual independence, one deserts his wife for another woman. Only Doris Lessing and Julia O’Faolain describe their fathers as distinct and separate entities, endowing them with the dimensions of characters in history, allowing them a proper dignity, yet ensuring that they remain physically anonymous. Angela Carter comes ...”

“... to resign. ‘To my mind it marks a temporary victory for political correctness, defined by Doris Lessing as that which was left when socialism died,’ the veteran broadcaster and former socialist Eoghan Harris insists. ‘Twenty years from now people will be incredulous that the Irish Republic spent three hundred million poking through the pissy ...”

“... writer needs to hang on to a sense of probability and of irony. In pre-publication publicity Doris Lessing has welcomed this novel’s ‘really impressive achievement’, which is to compress ‘the myths, the poetry, the history of a vast and ancient continent’; Michael Ondaatje has likened it to ‘a spirit painting in a 19th century locket ...”

“... in which the ‘madman’ is sane and the asylum’s director demented. Readers of R. D. Laing or Doris Lessing may well respond to these resonances, as I do myself; and I find equally telling Professor Prawer’s defence of Caligari against purist attacks on its ‘theatricality’ and its stylised painted sets. As he stresses, it was not at all a ...”