This collection of small essays reveals to us the world of Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing. Lessing is an extremely serious writer , one with a strong moral sense. She writes here about a number of her fellow writers, D.H.Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, A.C.Coppard, Bulgakov, George Meredith, Olive Schreiner, Tolstoy- about the writer who has meant the most to her Idries Shah, and the religious philosophy he espouses, Sufism- about animals, especially cats, about being young and being old, about the changes she has seen in writers mentality and motivation in her lifetime, about Education , about the tragedy of Zimbabwe,about Opera and her connection with the composer Philip Glass, about the difference between writing fiction and writing autobiography, about the satisfaction of knowing her book 'The Golden Notebook' has been read and enjoyed by so many people in so many different places. She also writes an essay about the wisdom of 'Ecclesiastes'. She writes of its prose. "From the very first verse of Ecclesiastes you are carried along on a running tide of sound, incantantory, almost hypnotic , and it is easy to imagine yourself sitting among this man's pupils, listeningt them..... Your ears are entranced , but at the same time you are very much alert."
I would say of this collection on the whole that there are spots in it in which the reader will be made very alert and feel that they have truly learned and enjoyed. But that there is not real inspiration or fire or humor in it. A decent work.