John Mitchinson

Even if the love is not reciprocated, how then does the person cope with this new reality?

It's so hard.

She's quite sadly mistaken.

She described herself as a depressive humorist or just depressed.

What's the difference?

And then she wrote this brilliant piece called Curriculum Vitae, which was published in 1989.

And it refers to what you're talking about, Lucy.

She says at the end of this,

I have remained true to my deepest convictions in her work she's talking about.

I mean, to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise, how can we manage to bear it?

That's it, though, isn't it?

Yeah, that's it.

That's the exact... I look at these...

poor distributions of power, whether by design or accident.

And I try and elucidate the comedy.

We used this quote about Muriel Spark when we did Memento Mori on Batlisted, which I lifted off of Amazon because I thought it was so brilliant, which was somebody said, Muriel Spark does not suffer the lazy reader.

And...

And I think that's true of Penelope Fitzgerald.

Again, she's kinder to the reader as well.

Can we listen to Mrs Fitzgerald's capacity for not quite answering a question and also talking about telly?