Doris Lessing

Friday

Doris Lessing

Diary – 1 October 2004

From our UK edition

Literary festivals, as usually reported, sound like pop concerts, with happy audiences and complacent writers, but that is only part of it. They are not alike. You may need wellies for one and sunscreen for another. Nor are the provisions alike. In Edinburgh this year my publishers forgot to send the book I was promoting, or rather selling. When I complained, much more in sorrow than in anger, there was a flurry of concern, and then the report came, ‘But it wasn’t us, the fault was in Glasgow.’ That’s all right then. But HarperCollins is usually very good, and often better than good. Edinburgh may be a place too far, but in China, where I went for the British Council, wherever I went my books were there too — showers of them.

Saturday

Doris Lessing

Grenada’s crowning glory

From our UK edition

Four years ago this author gave us Night & Horses & the Desert, an anthology of classical Arabic literature, all brave deeds, high thinking and love, wit and wisdom — chivalry, in short — reminding why so many generations of the English have fallen madly in love with this culture that is now dead and gone — and so much the worse for all of us. Never have I owned a more romantic book, but with this one Robert Irwin discourages romance. A first chapter is full of alluring tales about the Alhambra, but then he says, ‘Not one fact . . . is likely to be correct’, blaming the purveyors of the tourist industry. But when the truth is so generous with drama, who needs the embellishment?

Saturday