Stet

I have been asked by younger women how I brought myself to accept this situation so calmly, and I suppose that part of the answer must be conditioning: to a large extent I had been shaped by my background to please men, and many women of my age must remember how, as a result, you actually saw yourself – or part of you did – as men saw you, so you knew what would happen if you became assertive and behaved in a way which men thought tiresome and ridiculous. Grotesquely, you would start to look tiresome and ridiculous in your own eyes. Even now I would rather turn and walk away than risk my voice going shrill and my face going red as I slither into the sickening humiliation of undercutting my own justified anger by my own idiotic ineptitude.

But one can, of course, always walk away. That I could easily have done, and never thought of doing; so I doubt that it was only the mixed vanity and lack of confidence of the brainwashed female which held me there in acceptance of something which I knew to be unjust and which other women, whom I admired, were beginning actively to confront.

is impossible for someone of great natural charm to remain unaware of the effect he or she has on others, which makes the gift a dangerous one: the ability to get away with murder demands to be exploited, and over-exploited charm can be less attractive than charmlessness

All publishing was run by many badly-paid women and a few much better-paid men: an imbalance that women were, of course, aware of, but which they seemed to take for granted.

I believe the use of ‘f—’ was suggested; but ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’ occurred so often that this would have made the dialogue look like fish-net, so ‘fug’ and ‘fugging’ were agreed as substitutes.

All this book is, is the story of one old ex-editor who imagines that she will feel a little less dead if a few people read it.

They were both great gossips – and when I say great I mean great, because I am talking about gossip in its highest and purest form: a passionate interest, lit by humour but above malice, in human behaviour

People who buy books, not counting useful how-to-do-it books, are of two kinds. There are those who buy because they love books and what they can get from them, and those to whom books are one form of entertainment among several. The first group, which is by far the smaller, will go on reading, if not for ever, then for as long as one can foresee. The second group has to be courted. It is the second which makes the best-seller, impelled thereto by the buzz that a particular book is really something special; and it also makes publishers’ headaches, because it has become more and more resistant to courting.

Now I wonder whether we were expecting history to move faster than it can because we were witnesses of how fast an empire can crumble, and did not stop to think that falling down is always more rapid than building up . . . and what, anyway, were we expecting the multitude of tribal societies in that continent, many of them with roots more or less damaged by European intrusion, to build up to? Perhaps our concern was, and is, as much an aspect of neocolonialism as American investment in Nigerian oil-wells.

The country seemed to teem with people, most of them young women, so eager to work with books that they would endure poverty and pain to do so: a situation which we certainly exploited. The only people paid salaries commensurate with the value of their labour were our sales manager, our production manager and our accountant – all usually married men who would very properly not have taken the job for less.

and I knew that the quickest cure is lack of hope.