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Katharine Whitehorn
Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010
English - May 01, 2005 10:15 - 35 minutes - 32.3 MB - ★★★★★ - 126 ratingsPersonal Journals Society & Culture interview entrepreneurship business health entrepreneur leadership comedy news politics culture Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the journalist Katharine Whitehorn. Katharine Whitehorn was the first journalist to write a column about her personal and domestic life and draw broader truths from her experiences - it's the kind of material that is now commonly found on women's pages and is satirised in Private Eye's Polly Filler - but in the 1950s and 1960s it was a new phenomenon and she was its brightest and wittiest exponent.
She came to journalism through a circuitous route that took in Picture Post, Woman's Own and The Spectator, but it was on the Observer - where she worked for more than 30 years - that she really made her mark. She was at the vanguard of a generation of women who were told they could 'have it all' and she may even be the only one to have managed it - a successful, well-paid career, a happy marriage and complete family. While at the Picture Post she met Gavin Lyall - who went on to become a successful novelist - they had two sons and were married for 45 years until his death in 2002. She is now the agony aunt for Saga Magazine.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Slow movement of Double Violin Concerto by Johann Sebastian Bach
Book: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Luxury: A machine to distil whatever is there