I don’t go anywhere or do anything.” For conversation, she has her husband, her children and her grandchildren.Like many writers, Margaret Forster is something of an enigma. She has edited the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of our most lyrical poets, but claims to hate music. She adores reading, and would choose it over writing if forced to make the choice, but “can’t bear re-reading except in the course of work”.She has produced a body of work devoted largely to documenting and imagining the lives of women, but, when asked to choose the best literary critics, names only men. She will follow strangers off a train, if caught by a particularly interesting conversational snippet, but won’t meet a friend for coffee or a drink.Many writers are profoundly solitary, making occasional forays into the social world Margaret Forster feels no such need. The detached observation that’s necessary for a writer to report and shape her inner world seems with her to be much more than just a mode.

Sitting at her kitchen table, surrounded by books and pictures and the cosy paraphernalia of a writer’s life, we can see birds pecking around on the lawn and even hear them singing. Why, if her real life is in her head, should she want to go out?MARGARET FORSTER: A BIOGRAPHYMargaret Forster was born in Carlisle in 1938. From the County High School she won an open scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read history. The day after she finished her finals, she married Hunter Davies, who she met when she was 13.Her first novel, Dame’s Delight (1964), was published when she was 24 and her second, Georgy Girl (1965), was made into a film. Her others include Have the Men Had Enough? (1989), inspired by her mother-in-law’s Alzheimer’s, the bestselling Lady’s Maid (1990), Mother’s Boys (1994) and The Memory Box (1999). Diary of an Ordinary Woman is her 20th novel.Forster has written a number of works of non-fiction including Significant Sisters: the grassroots of active feminism 1838-1939, a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which won the Royal Society of Literature Award for 1988, and two family memoirs: Hidden Lives (1995) and Precious Lives (1998). She lives in north London with Hunter Davies and is a “very active grandmother”..

Admirably slender and unpretentious, this is also one of the funniest memoirs of recent years, on a par with George Melly’s Owning Up. The Gatekeeper, by Terry Eagleton (Penguin, £6.99, 178pp)
Admirably slender and unpretentious, this is also one of the funniest memoirs of recent years, on a par with George Melly’s Owning Up. How unexpected, then, that it is written by the professor of cultural theory at Manchester University, also a lifelong Marxist. The book could be accurately, if off-puttingly, described as a series of radical essays on an autobiographical theme Actually, they would make a great Comedy Club act.