A romantic socialist

There is no introduction to this collection of essays, reviews and ‘think-pieces’ by Doris Lessing, but they are presumably chosen by herself from the quantity of her literary criticism (the hardest work, or so they say) over a long political and literary lifetime. The pieces must have been difficult to assemble, for the acknowledgments in the back of the book include some very obscure sources alongside the blue-ribbon publications where you would expect to find ‘one of the most influential writers of the 20th century’.