One of Decca's favourite words. In a 1977 essay in the London Daily Mail (reprinted in the New York Times and later in Poison Penmanship), she wrote that "frenemy" (which she sometimes spelled "frienemy") was "an incredibly useful word that should be in every dictionary, coined by one of my sisters when she was…

Arrived back at Joan's just in time for dinner. To it came Doris Lessing (you know who she is, a best-selling English writer of the Angry Young school) . . . and, joy of joys, 12-year-old Peter Lessing, who had learned about Benjy's arrival and has planned his whole Easter…

But then one day, you know, I suddenly realized with an absolute shock that there never was going to be a convenient time, and that if I didn't make a beginning, I would be saying to my grandchildren, 'What I really wanted to be was a writer.' So I had…