The Common Reader

It was such a pleasure to talk to Sarah Harkness. Sarah is a former partner at Arthur Andersen who had a career in corporate finance and then as a non-executive director. She is now a literary late bloomer. She has self-published a book about the Victorian artist Nelly Erichsen. She has an MA in Biography from the University of Buckingham, where she studied with with Jane Ridley. She won the Tony Lothian Prize, 2022. And she is now writing a biography of the Victorian publisher Alexander Macmillan and his brother which will be published next year. We talked about Sarah’s career, her long-held ambitions, what she learned from corporate finance, her views on talent spotting, Alexander Macmillan, how Sarah would try to discover other late bloomers lurking in the wrong jobs, and why a business career helps you to understand Victorian literature.Being a Late Bloomer and Alexander MacMillanHenry: Are you a late bloomer?Sarah: My husband says I should be very annoyed at that question because he says I've been marvellous all along. I think I'm a late bloomer if in the blooming bit, which is that I'm now doing something that makes me really unconditionally happy, whereas before I did a lot of stuff that was sometimes important and sometimes well paid, but I never enjoyed it half as much as what I'm doing now.Henry: So, let's start with just briefly, what are you doing that makes you really happy now?Sarah: I have a contract to write a book that a proper-publishing house says they're going to publish. So I'm writing a biography, a double biography called The Brothers of Daniel and Alexander Macmillan, who founded MacMillan publishing 180 years ago. And it's taken me a while, but I've got an agent and I've got a publishing contract, and I need to submit a manuscript in the next eight months, and it will come out in 2024 all being well. And that's making me very happy.Henry: Good, and that's the grandfather or great-grandfather of the prime minister?Sarah: Daniel is the grandfather of the prime minister, and Alexander, who's the one who really built the business after Daniel died, is his great uncle.Henry: So an interesting family for more than just their business interests.Sarah: Yeah. And I mean, fantastic achievers themselves because Daniel and Alexander were born into absolute poverty on the West Coast of Scotland. Their father was a carter, who died when they were young boys. Daniel left school at 10, Alexander when he was 15. And by the mid-1860s, Alexander is one of the literary hosts of London, and within two generations, they have an offspring who will be prime minister and married into the Duke of Devonshire’s family, it's quite a climb.Henry: So, what we're talking about, this is really the Victorian self-made man?Sarah: Absolutely. Samuel Smiles and all his glory, absolutely.Henry: Yeah, yeah, we love Samuel Smiles.Sarah: Yeah, same.Henry: So, where does your interest in that type of subject or person come from?Sarah: Well, there's a basic love of all my period, of all the periods of history and all the periods of literature, Victorian times would be absolutely bang on is what I know most about. I'm very comfortable working in that time, and I love the books and the poetry from that time. The way I found it was very serendipitous, which was that my husband collects art and had found a lot of art by a big, very unknown Victorian woman painter. And I researched her life, and the more I researched it, the more I thought I need to write this down, and it turned into a book that no one would publish, but people said to me, "Write about someone we've heard of and come back to us," and that's a really hard question because almost everyone you've heard of has got a book. That's why you've heard of them, but I had a stroke of luck, which was literally in the research on the book about... The artist is called Nelly Erichsen, and in my research on her, she was a neighbour of the MacMillan family in South London in the 1870s, and related by marriage, sort of in a hop and a skip to the MacMillan family, so she knew the MacMillans, she stayed with the MacMillans. And I did research the MacMillan family to write about Nelly, and there wasn't a book, there haven't been a book since the 19... Since 1940. So there was an opening to do a book because most people have heard of MacMillan Publishing, most people would think it was interesting to understand how that had been started and no one has written about it for 80 years. So that was the stroke of luck, I think.Henry: So it comes from a kind of a long-term immersion in the period and a very indirect discovery of the subject matter?Sarah: It does, it does. I mean, I have been talking about Nelly Erichsen and her bit of Tooting where she lived and the people that she knew for, gosh, nearly 20 years now, so I mean it is a long immersion, but it took me a very long time to have confidence to show anyone what I was writing about it.Early interest in VictoriansHenry: Yeah. And that if we go back 20 years, is that where you start sort of reading and working on this?Sarah: Yes.Henry: Or had you been reading about the Victorians from earlier?Sarah: I think that... I mean, I did PPE at Oxford, but my favourite paper and finals was Victorian social political history, so the 1860s is bang on the period. I think all the time I was working and having a career, I was reading my way through Trollope and Dickens and George Eliot, so... And Tennyson. So that in that way, and it's the sort of art I like, so it is definitely my spot, but I had never thought about researching online, finding out about anyone and writing it down until, yeah, 15 years ago when I started doing that.Henry: But when you started doing that, you'd actually had years of reading the novels, being immersed in the period, it goes back, you were ready, you weren't just coming to this out of nowhere?Sarah: Yes, I wasn't, I wasn't. And it does remind me that about... Well, it was at the time when my children were babies, I wanted to give up work and study Victorian literature. I mean, I felt then that it was something I wanted to do, and I had an idea of writing... The book that inspired me was some Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.Henry: Fantastic book.Sarah: And I was fascinated, yeah, fascinated by the Melmotte character and I wanted to do an MA or something that would allow me to write, to use the knowledge I had at the city today against what was Trollope writing about, I thought that would be interesting. So I have thought about it 25 years ago, and that had to absolutely no encouragement from anyone to do anything about it. So I didn't, I kept working, but it's funny that that's almost where I've ended back up, which is looking at Victorian literature.Henry: Yeah, it's like a... It's a deep vein that runs through your life and now it's come to the surface.Sarah: It is, it is, absolutely.Sarah in the City: business expertise as a literary advantageHenry: So, you've hinted it that you did PPE, you were in the city, tell us, because you were already blooming before, you are not a late bloomer, you're a repeat bloomer, tell us what was happening when you weren't being a Victorian writer.Sarah: So, I went from Oxford into the city into a corporate finance house that was part of NatWest Bank, so we call that NatWest markets, and I did corporate finance, so flotations, mergers, takeovers, raising money from 1983 right the way through to 1990s. In the 1990s, I left London and moved up to Yorkshire, but I kept working. And at that point, I had small children, so I was working three or four days a week, working in Leeds doing corporate finance. And then there was a big excitement in 1998 because I left NatWest and took my team into Arthur Andersen, which at the time caused a bit of a fuss and a bit of a stir. And I had three or four... Four years at Arthur Andersen. And then Arthur Andersen went into liquidation. And at that point, I'd been doing corporate finance for nearly 20 years and I'd had enough of it, and there were a lot of young and unpleasant young men coming up who didn't think that women in their 40s with children should be stopping them doing what they wanted to do. So I did head-hunting for a little while, and then I started becoming a non-executive director, so I became plural. And I'm still plural, I still do trustee jobs, and audit jobs, non-executive director jobs.Henry: So you, in three different ways, at Arthur Andersen, and then as a head-hunter, and then as a non-exec, you've actually been a senior person. You've been running an area of a business, you've had that kind of oversight?Sarah: Yeah.Henry: Does this help you... You've got the background reading Trollope and understanding the character of Melmotte, but you've also got the background as actually a business person. So when you look at someone like MacMillan, if you hadn't done that career, you would have had less insight. Do you sort of...Sarah: I think that's right, I think that's right. I've spent some time in the archives just the other week looking at the partnership deeds from when he set the business up. I've looked at... There had to be a court case in Chancery when Daniel's widow died because she died in testate and there was a risk that the partnership would have to be dissolved and split around his children. So to me, that makes sense. The big risks that he takes, like moving from Cambridge to London, and then at the moment, I'm really interested in him opening an office in New York, which he did in 1869. I mean to me, that is about a business risk. And then, this little small bit. So at the time when I was running an office in Leeds, I was very conscious of how vulnerable you feel when you are not in the head-office, when you are running a satellite. And I've been reading this week, the letters coming back from New York to London, from the poor chap that Alexander sent out to New York. And I can... I mean, I could have written those letters, you know, "Just tell me what's going on?" "What are your plans?" "What do you mean your son's coming to work here?" "Is that alright? Is that a good sign?" And so that to me is business as well, so I do recognise a lot of it.Henry: Yeah, that's a timeless problem, especially in big-business today, right, global businesses?Sarah: It is, it is. "How do you make everyone feel equally important?" and, "How do you manage something that's the other side of the ocean?"Henry: So your book will be interesting, not just from a sort of literary and social-history perspective, but for people in business or people trying to understand how to be a manager.Sarah: I hope so, I hope so. Alexander did an enormous amount all on his own, but as I move on, he's going to start running a more complex business. And I haven't really gotten into that yet. He's got one partner and he's just set up, sent someone to New York. But it will become more interesting. And then, how he's gonna bring the sons and nephews into the business, is gonna be fascinating. Because they didn't all want to come in at the same time and he's got to manage that as well. So it is a business book.Henry: So he's a sort of... He's a great publisher with an eye for a book, he's a great businessman who can cut deals and manage money, and he's also important as a people manager.Sarah: He is, he is, and seems to manage that well. Other firms are not nearly as successful as MacMillan, avoid the wrong people. He never really gets anything... The big calls, he doesn't get them wrong. He never has a big failure. If he launches a magazine, he goes on supporting it, it survives. If he launches an office in New York, it becomes... MacMillan, New York, becomes bigger than MacMillan, England. He doesn't make bad calls, he is a good manager.Henry: And where does that come from? Because he grew up... He did not grow up around business people. Where does that come from?Sarah: He certainly didn't, he certainly didn't. I don't know, that's really interesting. I mean, I think he was much more entrepreneurial than his brother was. The business really takes off when Daniel dies. Daniel was driven by a Christian missionary spirit. He was driven by Christian socialism, he wanted to bring good-quality and religious literature to the masses and the working man. And he saw it as... He wasn't well enough to go to India, so this was his mission. Alexander goes along with that and is fascinated by the Christian socialist side, but he also wants to make money. And I think some of it might just be, you know... He wakes up one day in 1857, and suddenly he's responsible for eight children, his wife, and a widow, people who work for him. He really has to grip it or he'll sink. And he grips it. But how and why? Apart from sheer bravery, I don't know how he got to do that. He didn't have any models, he wasn't being mentored by anyone else in the industry, they all saw him as a Scottish upstart. So there's one guy he talks to who's a publisher in Edinburgh called MacLehose, but he becomes much more successful than MacLehose.Henry: Was he a late-bloomer?Sarah: Alexander? So when Daniel dies, he... How old is he? He's nearly 40, he's nearly 40. And up until then, yes, he's been the second fiddle in the business. He's had a ton of energy. I mean, if you research him, he's living in Cambridge, running a shop in Cambridge, but he's also... He's on the board of the Working Men's College that they establish. He's doing stuff with the YMCA in Cambridge. He's a parish overseer. He has a ton of energy, and he talks about... You know, he was up reading throughs till 2:00 in the morning, and he was up again at 6:00 to get a train to London. His wife must have been pulling her hair out, I would think. [laughter] So he was a man of phenomenal energy, and not good health, he suffered badly from sciatica and various other problems. He was sometimes frustrated with pain, but he never gave up. He's quite a hero.Henry: Yeah, he is. He sounds really interesting. I'm really looking forward to this book. So, I want to go back over your... We've had the summary of your life. I want to get into some details because it's really, really interesting how you kept to yourself those interests and ambitions for so long, and obviously lots of people do that. Lots of people leave university and they've got a thing that they really, they're passionate about, but they end up as an accountant or whatever, and it just sort of slowly dies, or they realise they're not quite as interested as all that, or life gets in the way, or they have kids. Why didn't it go away for you? Because when you were a senior at Arthur Andersen, you were pretty busy, right?Sarah: Yeah, and I don't think, if you'd said to me... If you had said to me when I was a senior at Arthur Andersen, "Would you still like to write a book?" I just said, "Don't be daft, of course not." [laughter] But my huge frustration with Andersen, and I had some mentoring at the time from a coach who said to me, "The problem you have is that you have a person who needs choice and the more involved in one particular job you get, the more you push, get pushed down a tunnel, the less happy you will be, Sarah, because you like to wake up every morning and you think, I'm gonna do something different today. What am I going to do today? What am I going to do today?" And that's the life I now have. And it's the life I've had since the day I walked out of Arthur Andersen in 2002, which is every day I've done something a bit different. And the lucky break that happened to me was the collapse of Andersen could have been a disaster, but actually it gave me a lump sum and it gave me freedom to explore, bend my career to suit my children and my circumstances, and it gave me time to discover the things I liked doing.Henry: Do you think... So one thing that separates a lot of late bloomers from early bloomers, although as discussed you were an early bloomer, but it's that early bloomers often have a mentor or they belong to a small group of their peers. So they have people that they can experiment with and have ideas with, or they have someone saying, "Don't be an idiot, you need to do this, why haven't you written to that person or whatever." And late bloomers often just don't have this.Sarah: No.Henry: But I've got a little theory that it probably wouldn't have made any difference. And that in a way, you're... Tell me if this is right, you're quite a divergent person.Sarah: Yeah.Henry: But you were in a very narrow life.Sarah: I was.Henry: And the only mentorship that you required was for someone to say, as they said to you, you're in the wrong game here.Sarah: Yes.Henry: And you needed to take your own time, you needed to take your own path. There's something innate about, or just in your personality, that means you were never going to write a book when you were 25.Sarah: No.Henry: And the other experiences you gathered along the way were part of that divergence. What do you think of that as a sort of model of you and of other late bloomers?Sarah: I certainly think that there was no way when I was in my 20s and 30s, anyone that I knew, socialised with or worked with would have had any interest at all in what interested me. I mean, none of them read. None of them went to the theatre like I went to the theatre. None of them had the interest in film that I had. And at the time, I was married into the medical profession, and they absolutely weren't. So I mean at business they weren't interested, medics aren't interested, or don't have time to be fair to them. So it had to be just in my head and what I read and what I started listening to once you started getting audio books and I had time. So definitely there was no one around in my 20s who would have given me any encouragement to do anything different, and I was sucked into a job that was very high, very exciting, very high pressure and very rewarding, and then I had children, which we know, really upped the confusion of life. And I was just lucky that at the age of 40 I was relaxed and comfortable enough to be able to start spending my time with people who were encouraging.Henry: How unusual do you think it is to have... You do PPE, you work in corporate finance, but you've also got a strong interest in literature and the arts, and as you say, you don't do...Sarah: Really unusual. I can think... Of all the people I worked with right through for NatWest under Andersen, I can remember the one guy who, if you went on a business trip with him would open his briefcase to get out a book. He was a wonderful man, he was called Simon Metgrove, and he carried poetry around his briefcase. I remember him. He is the only one. I mean, no one else did, they read the... They read the FT, they talked about business. There was a lot of heavy drinking. It just, it wasn't part of the culture at all, and I didn't live with anyone who read like I read either. So it was completely me on my own blowing my own little furrow.Henry: Where does this joint interest come from? Is that parents, school, Oxford? Is it something you just always remember?Sarah: I think from my parents. I think particularly from my mother who had, came from a very, very poor background, left school as fast as she could when war broke out and got a job at the age of 16. And then after she married, my dad became a more senior civil servant. My mum discovered she needed and wanted to educate herself, so when I was growing up, my mother was doing WEA classes, and talking to me because I was by far the youngest child, so I was more or less at home on my own with her. She would talk to me about an essay she had to write on Jane Austin or she was reading T.S. Eliot, and she would talk to me about it all the time. So that was very encouraging. And she knew poetry, and that's... I've passed on to my children who are all interested in literature in their way. That background, if you need to... You know the stories, you know every Jane Austin, you know your Dickens, you know your poems. That comes from my mum and my dad as well. Yeah.Henry: Sounds like your mum was a bit of a late bloomer.Sarah: I think she was a frustrated, never bloomed because she was that generation of just they stated at home, and it didn't do her any good at all. She was quite an unhappy woman.Henry: Do you have her in mind as a sort of model of she went back and started doing that education and was that something that was just with you?Sarah: I think it probably was, I think it made sense to me that I could do an MA when I was 55, because my mother would have thought that was a sensible thing to do. If I had the time and the money, and then why wouldn't I do it? So yeah, it seems perfectly sensible to me, I didn't think it was odd. My husband had done one as well, and he was... I've never had any education at all, and did an MA ten years ago, so.Henry: Oh great.Sarah: Yeah, University of Buckingham.Henry: Oh very good.[laughter]Henry: And how did you end up at Oxford?Sarah: Oh, I came from a tiny Grammar School in Dorset that sent one girl to Oxford or Cambridge about every three or four years, so it felt like quite a lonely process. And I had massive imposter syndrome. I didn't get into the college I applied to, but there's a college in Oxford, Mansfield, that used to just collect all the best people that didn't get into any of the other colleges. We were all there with chips on our shoulders because we haven't got into some St. John's or Balliol and the others. And it was an incredibly good atmosphere, but it's still, there were two issues, one was Oxford was still dominated by the public schools, and I was a Grammar School girl.And Oxford was dominated by the big confident academic colleges, and I was at the college no one had heard of, so spinning out of that and into the city, just felt like that was a bit of a weird stroke of luck, because even though I was at Oxford doing PPE, I didn't feel like I was... I didn't feel like I had... It would never have occurred to me to become academic when I left university. I wasn't going to get a first, I wasn't going to do that.Henry: But did this thing about imposter syndrome and sort of being in a marginal position, is that quite good because it does encourage you to sort of keep seeing yourself as divergent and keep seeing yourself as not quite in the right place. It preserves that energy of well, I'm here, but I'm not going to stay here, whereas if you'd got into the right college and being more accepted, maybe you would have just a bit more easily slipped into a, staying on the track, if you like.Sarah: Maybe, maybe. But I don't feel that I was a very assertive person when I started work. To me, working my way up through the city, I would contrast myself with mostly men who were working around me, all of whom had a time table, I've got to be an assistant director by this age and I'm going to be director by this age, then I'm going to go out and join a real company and I'm going to make money. And I was just wanted to keep my job and keep doing it.And not get in any trouble. But then what used to happen is I would get to know someone at my level, and I think, well, other clever people in the next room because he's not very bright, and then why is he gonna get promoted and not me? Because I think I'm better. So I think there's a bit of that chippiness or edginess which makes you... Which can make you push on a bit harder, but it certainly didn't drive me. I was always a bit surprised, to be honest, I was always a bit surprised when I got promoted, I was a bit surprised when Andersen hired me and I was very surprised when that got in the papers. It was always a bit of a surprise to me. So I didn't have much confidence.Henry: As you talk about your background, it sounds a bit like there are parallels between you and McMillan. You don't come from an Arthur Andersen background, but there you are and you become very successful, just like he didn't come from that. Is that part of what interests him to you, like, are you writing about yourself?Sarah: Well, I haven't thought of that, but I think I absolutely am sensitive. So I feel for him when I know how much he did for certain Victorian writers, and I go to their memoirs and diaries and letters, and he hardly gets a mention. And I know because I can see all the letters he wrote to them where he said, "You've got to change the title, you've got to take out half that book, why don't you write about this instead." I can see what he was giving to them, and then you go to the index of some of their books, and he gets a one line or it mentions that this is something I wrote in Macmillan magazine. I am very sensitive to Alexander 's, feeling that people took him for granted, didn't give him any due reward, and I suspect he... Yeah, I suspect, I do imagine that he felt some of the stuff that I felt, which is, have I got any right to be in this room and actually now I've met them, they're not a bright as I thought they were gonna be. And you could see his confidence grows in the '60s, he definitely becomes a lot more assertive with his authors during the '60s.Henry: Oh, really?Sarah: Yeah, the more he spends time with them, the firmer he gets about I'm not publishing that, this isn't good enough, he takes on Lady Caroline Norton and that's quite a brave thing to do.And I think he wins, so that's very hard to tell.Henry: I always have a slightly, not very well-informed view, but a view that there was less editing of novels in the 19th century, and that Thomas Hardy dropped off his manuscript and they printed it, and that was that. You seem to have found a lot of material that suggests that the authors wouldn't talk about it, but that their work more edited quite heavily.Sarah: I think their work was edited quite heavily. And particularly, so the complication is the ones who are submitting for something for serialisation in a magazine, I think they were just so relieved to get at each month and another month that turned up. 'Cause you know that they were writing up to the deadline. So that didn't get edited, but then sometimes you can see at Macmillan saying, "When we turn this into a book, we're gonna do something different with it." That definitely happens. He does it to Charles Kingsley, Water Babies when it comes out as a book, has been edited from what appeared in the magazine. And what the other author, Mrs. Oliphant published a serial in the magazine, and he definitely got her to change it before it went into the book. So he did have an influence on these people, you wouldn't get from either their biographies or autobiographies.Life LessonsHenry: No. So this sort of feeling that you've described as almost a chip on the shoulder feeling, I think this is potentially an advantage because when I look at some of the scientific research on late bloomers, one thing you notice is, take scientists, for example. A lot of scientists make their breakthrough when they are young, but when people have researched this and said why is that, it's because a lot of scientists stop working once they get tenure or once they win a prize or whatever. The scientists who do carry on working, keep making breakthroughs. [chuckle] So it's actually not because there's anything special about being young, it's because that's when people are really trying. If you don't ever settle into, the people you have met who are on a time table, "I'm going to be a director at this age," they get there and they settle in and, great. They can cruise through for a bit. But if you never settle into that or you retain the chip or you retain the sort of feeling of oh, God. Oh, God. Should I really be here? That's actually quite good because it keeps you energetic and it keeps you looking and it keeps you thinking "What am I going to do? What am I going to do?" Do you think there's a kind of... I don't know. Was that part of your success and Alexander's success that it... You never settled for what you had.Sarah: Yeah. I think that's right and there's something else I would see a parallel, which is I was not the greatest corporate financier in terms of my grasp of numbers and I'm hopeless at negotiation. But what I was doing, which most of my colleagues weren't, is I can market and sell. I'm interested in people and I used to go and win business. I used to bring it back and then other people would transact it, but that's certainly what I did in Yorkshire. I was out all the time meeting people because I was interested and I wanted to know what they did and what they did and how does that business work.So I was always out looking and I never wanted to just sit at my desk and shout at people and run the numbers again. I wasn't very good at any of that, but I think I can see that in Alexander too. I mean, Alexander recruits a partner in the mid-1860s to take the back end off him because he just wants to be out meeting new authors and that's what he's gonna be good at and George Lillie Craik is going run the numbers and have the fights with the printers and talk to America. So I can see that and I think that is... You're not that interested in the day job, you're interested in the next idea and the next interesting thing that's gonna grab your attention. And because you're interested, other people bond with you and, hey, you've made a sale. I used to talk to potential clients who would say, "It's really good that you've come out because you sound like you're genuinely interested in this business whereas the other three guys were just wondering what fee they could get out of me."That's why I would win business 'cause I was interested in them as people and I made friends and I asked interesting questions. And I wasn't just there kicking the tires and then hoping I can sign someone up, you know?Henry: Yeah, yeah. That's the novel reader in you.Sarah: Yes.Henry: There will be lots of women in their 30s in City jobs or office jobs or accountancy jobs or whatever who feel the way you felt. Either they've got imposter syndrome or they secretly would rather just be reading Trollope or whatever. What's your advice to them? Difficult to give advice in general terms, but, you know.Sarah: Yeah. My advice is you will... The thing you will do best is the thing that makes you happiest. So if you go on trying to push yourself into being something that you see other people being and it's not really making you happy, you won't be very successful at it anyway. So it is worth taking a risk and thinking is there something out there I could do, which I'm... Owning a flower shop or whatever, that would make me happier. If I had stayed on in corporate finance, if I had gone into private equity, I could have made millions and millions, but I don't think I'd have been any happier. In fact, I think I'd have been a lot less happy than I am sitting here on a tiny, little book advance doing exactly what I wanted to do. I don't regret any of that because I wouldn't have enjoyed it. I wouldn't have liked doing it.I mean, the other thing is... The other thing I would say to all women who are in my position is don't beat yourself up all the time that you're not being the perfect mother or the perfect executive because you're gonna live with that guilt forever and you're never gonna know what you could have done better. If you had given up, maybe you'd have been a terrible mother at home. If you'd found the children out or never had them, maybe your career wouldn't have taken off. You're never going to know. So don't beat yourself up with that, just do the best you can and cut corners wherever you can and get help. And don't be afraid to say, "I need help with this" and "I can't come tonight 'cause I've got to go to a parents evening." Just... The more women say that we need help with this and don't try and pretend that it's easy. It's not easy. It's never gonna be easy to do both. I found it very hard.Henry: So you are now navigating the publishing world. Doing book research, being a writer. What things did you learn from your earlier career in all its guises whether it's like small techniques and skills or sort of big life lessons or whatever, but what things did you learn from that earlier career that you're sort of using now?Sarah: I certainly learned... I mean, I certainly picked up a lot of small skills along the way. I am a very fast reader, I'm a summariser and a lot of my job in corporate finance was writing good, crisp, prose because you wrote prospectus because you wrote... So I think all of that has helped. I think I'm a better writer and a better researcher because I did it professionally for 20 years, but we called it corporate finance. I mean, there was a lot of cross over. In terms of the bigger stuff, what have I learned? I've learned to cope with worry and stress. I mean, if you wake up in the middle of the night and stuff's going around in your head, get up, have a cup of tea and write it all down. Don't lie in bed worrying that you're not going back to sleep. You just have to learn to cope with stress.And I think the other thing I've learned and I try and get into my children's head all the time is to be more assertive just not to run away and hide. If you think something's wrong or you're not being treated properly, don't lose your temper, don't sulk and don't spend your whole life taking it out on your friends and your family. You have to address it at work. Nothing is more boring than the person who really ought to have handed in their notice and just spends their whole life moaning to their wife, their husband, their best friends about what their bloody job is. Don't do it. If you don't like what you're doing, you will become very boring and to everybody else. Change your job. Change your job.Henry: Yes. Yes. Having recently been that person, I can endorse that sentiment. Sarah: So we've all done that. We've all spent time listening to someone who's thinking, why don't they just stop doing this job if it's making them so unhappy? And I know that's a... I know particularly the current climate that's easier said than done, but don't, life's very short really.Henry: Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's right. And what would the Alexander McMillan advice be? Could we have a little book of the wisdom of Alexander McMillan?Sarah: I think he's going... I mean, I am absolutely immersed in his life in the 1860s. And it is that the decade of the 1860s is the absolute pivotal decade for the business. It completely transforms. It looks utterly different in 1870 than it did in 1860. In 1871, his first wife dies and he rapidly remarries a much younger woman. And I think he starts going abroad on holidays. And I think his life changes. I think the 1870s Alexander is gonna... Had a younger woman saying to him, you're killing yourself. It's not worth it. You've got sons coming into the business, let George take the strain. We're going to France for a month Alexander and you are coming too. I mean, I think his life is gonna change in the 1870s.Ask me again when I know what he's writing to people in the ’70s. Because in the ’60s, he's saying, get your head down. Really got to work. Put start another book. Don't let the grass grow on your feet. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. He's at it all the time. I think he's gonna have a very different attitude in 10 years' time.Henry: A lot of writers seem to have a decade or a 15 year period where they kind of really do most of their great work. If that seems to be like that for him, but in a business sense, then you're saying the '60s that was his time and then it cooled off.Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And well after... But with a publishing house in particular, I think once you built up a critical mass, it's not so difficult to run because good authors are going come to you and you can be selective and you can take a Thomas Hardy manuscript and you can take a Kipling manuscript and a Henrig. They're going to come to you. Whereas in the 1860s, he's really scrabbling around. What's going to be good? And he creates things like the Golden Treasury Series or the Clarendon Press textbooks with Oxford University. He's creating things because he hasn't got Thomas Hardy or Henry James. He's got Charles Kingsley, who's becoming increasingly racist and unpleasant. By the 1870s, the business is... There's a magazine that comes out every month. It has regular subscriptions.And now Nature is going to come out every month and be written for by her Huxley. And he's got, he can choose who he publishes. So I think by the 1870s, the business runs much better even when he is on holiday. Whereas in the 1860s, he just needs to be there every day and he needs to read every manuscript and he needs to look at every proof and he's changing the colour of the bindings. He's in all over it and I think it would've killed him and it killed his wife possibly. And I think in the 1870s, it's easier for him to step back. And then he starts having a son and a nephew in the business. And then he has three nephews in the business, I mean, it just moves on. And he's lucky that the next generation of the one, two, three, five boys, three of them stay in the business and are still in the business in their 70s and 80s. And they all die within a couple of months of each other in 1936, bang, bang, bang. But they were all there, three brothers. So he's lucky in that there is at least two generations of McMillan that know how to run a publishing company. Not everyone gets that. Do they? Some people can't even get to some...Talent SpottingHenry: What did you learn about talent spotting when you were at Arthur Andersen?Sarah: That one of the best things you can have in a business career is instinct about people, that I could always tell within five minutes of an interview starting whether I ought to hire this person or not. It's a bit like house hunting, it all looks lovely on paper and then sometimes you get to the gate and you think I'm not even going to look at this house. [laughter] I can't imagine living in this house, why have I come? And I think I had really good instinct for people spotting and I was good at bringing people on particularly women. I mean, there were a couple of women around who say nice things to me about I learned a lot from you, Sarah.Henry: What were the signals? The good and the bad signals? What set your instincts off?Sarah: Genuine intelligence, not just... A spark in the eye literally and a bit of a sense of humour. So not just they've learned it all by wrote. I wasn't ever interested in the people who told me they'd been reading the Financial Times since they were 12. I was interested in someone who'd tell me something interesting they'd seen it on the back of a lorry coming into the interview. That was a better sign for me of genuine interest. And I always used to say when I was teaching other people to interview and hire as well, if you don't think...If this new person is going start on Monday morning, am I going to really look forward to seeing them? Or am I thinking that, I hope this is gonna be alright? Then you've already made your decision, you want that person to be someone you wanna work with on a Monday morning when it's pouring with rain and you've got to hangover you. So pick people who you are gonna get on with and who are as bright as you are or brighter if you can find them.Henry: Let's say I was going to plant you into the offices of some big consultancy, PwC or EY or someone, and your job is to talent spot some potential late bloomers. They don't have to want to write a book or be victorious, they just have to be some other Sarahs, who have this in them, but they're not talking about it, and we don't know what it is, how are you going to go about looking for these people, and when will your instinct sort of prick up and say, "Yeah, I'm gonna get to know her, she seems like there's something in the background there."Sarah: I think it's the... You're gonna see that person thinking outside the box. So in a room of people where everyone said something around the table, they've said the most interesting thing that wasn't what anyone else said. And it might have been a small point that they've made, but it was just different their brains weren't working, they weren't doing groups speak. Because they may not have been listening to the group speak and they might though it was very dull, but this was the thing that had been interesting them about this problem. And I know that's the thing. I also think I would be looking for the person who had done something interesting at the weekend, or was going to theatre that night or just the show that the brain was not completely sucked into the job, that in fact, they were probably more looking like hoping they were gonna get to the national theatre that night, than worrying about anything else that was going on. It's that feeling that you have a life outside work. And for lots of people, there is no life outside work.And I feel so sorry for them when they give up because, what are they gonna do with their lives? Whereas I always knew that there were 50 things. If I'd have to stop working tomorrow, I wouldn't have been bored for a second, there are 50 things I wanted to do, and I always feel sorry for people to say, "Oh, I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have this job." Really? You know.But I think, how do you spot them when that's not coming out? I think you are gonna spot them because they are gonna say something that's a different take from everyone else.Henry: Yeah, no, that's interesting, if you're not going to sort of have the chance to see them pull a book of poetry out of the briefcase or whatever, you can... You're saying there are signals in the meeting. Comes back to divergence almost, they're not...Sarah: It does.Henry: How many people do you think you met like that in your career? I tell you why I'm asking, I feel like we have no idea how many late bloomers there could be out there. But my suspicion is there a lot of people who could be in the right circumstances, given the right conditions or whatever, but we just don't know.Sarah: No, I don't know. I don't think many. I can't think of people. There were people who did surprisingly well after I'd worked with them, went off and did other business things and have done very well, and I think... Well, I wonder what they might do next.Henry: Were they the ones saying the out of the box stuff in the meeting or are there other indicators of those?Sarah: There's a girl in particular, I'm thinking about, who worked for me and Leeds who could have gone down a very boring banking corporate route. Actually, she's now running a really interesting small business, and she always... She used to get teased and laughed at because she would sometimes say such off the wall things, used to make a look a bit stupid sometimes, but I always used to be interested in what she'd said, 'cause there was something going on there. So I would think about her. I'm trying to think. So later life, when I've been around NHS boards, there are people there who I think could easily spring off and do something completely different, 'cause working for the NHS is so completely absorbing of your life, your energy and your compassion, but some of them are very interesting people, they wouldn't be doing that job otherwise.Best Victorian Novel?Henry: Finally give us a recommendation for one really good Victorian novel that we might not have read.Sarah: Okay, I'm going to say a part from I've already told you that I love The Way We Live Now, and I love Middlemarch, which I think are the two absolute classic novels. But the one that I read last year, which I'd never heard of and loved, it's by Mrs. Oliphant, and it's called Hester, and it was written, I think in the 1880s, and it's set in a small town, but it's about a woman who saves the Family Bank from going bankrupt. Her father has over extended the bank and run off, and a bit like, It's a Wonderful Life, there's going to be a run on the bank, but Hester goes into the office, it's a small town, and the fact that she's there, she saves the bank and effectively runs it, and then the book starts as the next generation are coming through what's gonna happen. And will she have to do it again? It's a really good book.Henry: Yeah, that sounds a great.Sarah: Hester by Mrs. Oliphant.Henry: I'm going to read that. Well, Sarah, thank you very much.Sarah: Thank you, Henry. It's been very enjoyable.Thanks for reading. If you’re enjoying The Common Reader, let your interesting friends know what you think. Or leave a comment at the bottom.If you don’t subscribe to The Common Reader, but you enjoy reading whatever’s interesting, whenever it was written, sign up now. This is a public episode. 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Before we get started… Writing elsewhereI have recently written about modern Russian literature for CapX, as well Victorian YIMBYs and Katherine Mansfield and 1922, for The Critic.Tours of LondonSign up here to get updates when we add new tour dates. There will be three tours a month, covering the Great Fire, Barbican, Samuel Johnson and more!Helen Lewis is a splendid infovore, which is how she has come to be one of the most interesting journalists of her generation. You will see in this conversation some of her range. We chatted before we recorded and she was full of references that reflect her broad reading. She reminded me of Samuel Johnson saying that in order to write a book you must turn over half a library. I recommend her book Difficult Women to you all, perhaps especially if you are not generally interested in “feminist” books. Helen is also working on a new book called The Selfish Genius. There’s an acuity to Helen, often characterised by self-editing. She has the precision — and the keenness to be precise — of the well-informed. She was also, for someone who claims to be a difficult woman, remarkably amiable. That seeming paradox was one of the things we discussed, as well as biography, late bloomers, menopause, Barbara Castle, failure, Habsburgs and so on... I had not realised she was such a royal biography enthusiast, always a good sign. Helen’s newsletter, by the way, has excellent links every week. It’s a very good, and free, way to have someone intelligent and interesting curate the internet for you. Her latest Atlantic feature is about defunct European royals who are not occupying their throne. Let’s hope one of Helen’s screenplays gets produced…(I do not know, by the way, if Tyler Cowen would endorse the reference I made to him. I was riffing on something he said.)[This transcript is too long for email so either click the title above to read online or click at the bottom to go to the full email…]Henry: Is Difficult Women a collective biography, a book of connected essays, feminist history or something else?Helen Lewis: Start nice and simple. It was designed as the biography of a movement. It was designed as a history of feminism. But I knew from the start I had this huge problem, which is that anyone who writes about feminism, the first thing that everybody does is absolutely sharpens their pencils and axes about the fact that you inevitably missed stuff out. And so I thought what I need to do is really own the fact that this can only ever be a partial history. And its working subtitle was An Imperfect History of Feminism, and so the thematic idea then came about because of that.And the idea of doing it through fights, I think, is quite useful because that means that there was a collision of ideas and that something changed. You know, there were lots and lots of subjects that I thought were really interesting, but there wasn't a change, a specific "We used to be like this, and now we're like this," that I could tie it to. So I don't think it is a collective biography because I think there's no connection between the women except for the fact that they were all feminists, and to that extent, they were all change makers. And I've read some really great collective biographies, but I think they work best when they give you a sense of a milieu, which this doesn't really. There's not a lot that links Jayaben Desai in 1970s North London and Emmeline Pankhurst in 1900s Manchester. They're very disparate people.Henry: Some people make a distinction between a group biography, which is they all knew each other or they were in the same place or whatever, and a collective biography, which is where, as you say, they have no connection other than feminism or science or whatever it is. Were you trying to write a collective biography in that sense? Or was it just useful to use, as a sort of launching off point, a woman for each of the fights you wanted to describe?Helen Lewis: I think the latter because I felt, again, with the subject being so huge, that what you needed to do was bring it down to a human scale. And I always feel it's easier to follow one person through a period of history. And weirdly, by becoming ever more specific, I think you'll have a better chance of making universal points, right? And one of the things that when I'm reading non-fiction, I want to feel the granularity of somebody's research which, weirdly, I think then helps you understand the bigger picture better. And so if you take it down all the way to one person, or sometimes it's more... So Constance Lytton and Annie Kenney, that's sort of two people. I think probably Constance is bigger in that mix. It helps you to understand what it's like to be a person moving through time, which is what I wanted to kind of bring it back. Particularly, I think, with feminism where one of the problems, I think, is when you get progress made, it seems like common sense.And it's one of the things I find I love about Hilary Mantel's, the first two of that Thomas Cromwell trilogy, is there is a real sense that you don't know what's going to happen. Like the moment, the hinge moment, of Anne Boleyn's star appears to be falling. It's very hard not to read it now and think, "Well, obviously that was destined to happen. You'd obviously jumped ship to Jane Seymour." But she manages to recreate that sense of living through history without knowing the ending yet, right? And so maybe you should stick with Anne Boleyn. Maybe this has all just been a temporary blip. Maybe she'll have a son next year. And that's sort of what I wanted to recreate with feminism, is to put you back in the sensation of what it is to be like making those arguments about women having a vote at a time when that's seen as a kind of crackpot thing to be arguing for because obviously women are like this, obviously women are delicate, and they need to be protected. And when all of those arguments... Again, to go back to what it's like to just to live in a time where people's mindsets were completely different to... Which is to me, is the point of writing history, is to say... And the same thing about travel writing, is to say, "Here are people whose very basis, maybe even the way that they think, is completely different to all of your assumptions." All your assumptions that are so wired so deeply into you, you don't even know they're assumptions. You just think that's what consciousness is or what it is to be alive. And that's, I think, why I try to focus it on that human level.Henry: How do you do your research?Helen Lewis: Badly, with lots of procrastination in between it, I think is the only honest answer to that. I went and cast my net out for primary sources quite wide. And there was some... The number of fights kept expanding. I think it started off with eight fights, and then just more and more fights kept getting added. But I went to, for example, the LSC Women's Library has got a suffragette collection. And I just read lots and lots of suffragette letters on microfiche. And that was a really good way into it because you've got a sense of who was a personality and who had left enough records behind. And I write about this in the book, about the fact that it's much easier to write a biography of a writer because they'll fundamentally, probably, give you lots of clues as to what they were thinking and doing in any particular time. But I also find things that I found really moving, like the last letter from Constance Lytton before she has a stroke, which has been effected by being force fed and having starved herself. And then you can see the jump, and then she learns to write again with her other hand, and her handwriting's changed.And stuff like that, I just don't think you would get if you didn't allow yourself to be... Just sort of wade through some stuff. Someone volunteered to be my research assistant, I mean I would have paid them, I did pay them, to do reports of books, which apparently some authors do, right? They will get someone to go and read a load of books for them, and then come back. And I thought, "Well, this is interesting. Maybe I'll try this. I've got a lot of ground to cover here." And she wrote a report on a book about… I think it was about environmental feminism. And it was really interesting, but I just hadn't had the experience of living through reading a book. And all of the stuff you do when you're reading a book you don't even think about, where you kind of go, "Oh, that's interesting. Oh, and actually, that reminds me of this thing that's happened in this other book that's... Well, I wonder if there's more of that as I go along." I don't think if you're going try and write a book, there is any shortcut.I thought this would be a very... I'm sure you could write a very shallow... One of those books I think of where they're a bit Wikipedia. You know what I mean. You know sometimes when you find those very 50 inspirational women books, those were the books I was writing against. And it's like, you've basically written 50 potted biographies of people. And you've not tried to find anything that is off the beaten track or against the conventional way of reading these lives. It's just some facts.Henry: So biographically, you were perhaps more inspired by what you didn't want to write than what you did.Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that's very true. I think writing about feminism was an interesting first book to pick because there's so much of it, it's like half the human race. It's really not a new subject. And to do the whole of British feminism really was a mad undertaking. But I knew that I didn't want to write, "You go girl, here's some amazing ladies in history." And I wanted to actually lean into the fact that they could be weird or nasty or mad. And my editor said to me at one point, and I said, "I'm really worried about writing some of this stuff." She said, "I think you can be more extreme in a book," which I thought was really interesting.Which I think is also very true in that I also feel like this about doing podcasts is that I very rarely get in trouble for things I've said on podcasts because it's quite hard to lazily clip a bit of them out and put them on Twitter and toss the chum into the water. Right? And I think that's the same thing about if you write something on page 390 of a book, yeah, occasionally, someone might take a screen-grab of it, but people hopefully will have read pages 1-389 and know where you're coming from, by that point.Henry: Maybe trolls don't read.Helen Lewis: Well, I think a lot of the stuff that annoys me is a shallow engagement with complexity, and an attempt to go through books and harvest them for their talking points, which is just not how... It's just such a sad, weathered way of approaching the experience of reading, isn't it? Do I agree with this author or not? I like reading people I disagree with. And so for example, the fact that I call the suffragettes terrorists, and I write about that, I think people are reluctant to engage with the fact that people you agree with did terrible things in the pursuit of a goal that you agree with. And I think it's very true about other sectors. I always think about the fact that Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for terrorism. And that gets pushed down in the mix, doesn't it? When it all turns out that actually, he was a great man. And that incredibly long imprisonment in Robben Island is its own totemic piece of the history of modern South Africa, that you don't wanna sit with the awkward bits of the story too.Henry: You've had a lot of difficult experiences on Twitter? Would you have written this book if you hadn't lived through that?Helen Lewis: I think that's a hard question to answer. I tried not to make it a “Here is the cutting of all my enemies.” And actually, my friend, Rob read this book in draft and he insisted that everyone I knew that I was going to argue with had to be of sufficient stature to be worth arguing with. He's like, You cannot argue with, I think I put it in my drawing piece, a piece like Princess Sparklehorse 420. Right? That's quite hard when you're writing about modern feminism, because actually if you think about what I think of as the very social justice end of it, right? The end of it, that is very pro sex work, very pro self-identification of gender, very pro prison abolition, police abolition, it's actually quite hard to find the people who were the theorists of that. It's more of a vibe that you will find in social media spaces on Tumblr, and Twitter and other places like that. So trying to find who is the person who has actually codified all that and put that down to then say, "Well, let's look at it from all sides", can be really difficult. So I did find myself slightly arguing with people on Twitter.Henry: I'm wondering more, like one way I read your book, it's very thought-provoking on feminism, but it's also very thought-provoking just on what is a difficult person. And there's a real thing now about if you're low in agreeableness, that might mean you're a genius, like Steve Jobs, or it might mean you're a Twitter troll. And we have a very basic binary way of thinking about being difficult. And it’s actually very nuanced, and you have to be very clever about how to be difficult. And in a way, I wondered if one of the things you were thinking about was, well, everyone’s doing difficult in a really poor way. And what we need, especially on the left, is smart difficult, and here is a book about that, and please improve. [chuckle]Helen Lewis: Yeah, there was a lot of that and it's part of the sort of bro-ey end of philosophy is about maybe women have been less brilliant through history because they're less willing to be disagreeable, they have a higher need to be liked, which I think is kind of interesting. I don't entirely buy it. But I think there's an interesting thing there about whether or not you have to be willing to be iconoclastic. The thing that I find interesting about that is, again, there's another way in which you can refer to it, which is the idea that if you're a heretic, you're automatically right.Henry: Yes.Helen Lewis: And there's a lot of...Henry: Or brave.Helen Lewis: Or brave, right? And I think it's... You can see it in some of the work that I'm doing at the moment about the intellectual dark web being a really interesting example. Some of them stayed true to the kind of idea that you were a skeptic. And some of them disbelieved the mainstream to the extent that they ended up falling down the rabbit holes of thinking Ivermectin was a really great treatment for COVID, or that the vaccines were going to microchip you or whatever it might be. And so I'm always interested in how personality affects politics, I guess. And yeah, how you can be self-contained and insist on being right and not cow-tow to other people without being an a*****e is a perpetually interesting question. It's coming up in my second book a lot, which is about genius. Which is sort-of the similar thing is, how do you insist when everybody tells you that you're wrong, that you're right. And the thing that we don't talk about enough in that context, I think Newton is a very good example is that, obviously, he made these incredible breakthroughs with gravity and mathematics, and then spends literally decades doing biblical chronology and everyone tells him that he's wrong, and he is wrong. And we don't really talk about that side of it very much.All the people who spent all their time studying phlogiston and mesmerism, or that's more complicated because I think that does lead to interesting insights. A lot of people who the world told was wrong, were wrong. And we're over-indexing, always writing about the ones who were the one Galileo saying the Earth still moves, and they turned out to be correct.Henry: Yes. There are good books about biographies of failures, but they're less popular.Helen Lewis: Which is tough because most of us are going to be failures.Henry: Yes. Well, you’re not gonna buy a book to reinforce that.Helen Lewis: No, but maybe there could be some deep spiritual learning from it, which is that a life spent in pursuit of a goal that turns out to be illusory is still a noble one.Henry: That’s a fundamentally religious opinion that I think a secular society is not very good at handling.Helen Lewis: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I’ve been doing lots of work for Radio 4 about the link between politics and religion, and whether or not religion has to some extent replaced politics as Western societies become more secular. And I think there is some truth in that. And one of the big problems is, yes, it doesn’t have that sort of spirit of self-abnegation or the idea of kind of forgiveness in it, or the idea of just desserts happening over the horizon of death. Like everything’s got be settled now in politics here, which I think is a bad fit for religious impulses and ideas.Henry: What is the role of humour in being difficult?Helen Lewis: I think it’s really important because it does sweeten the pill of trying to make people be on your side. And so I had a long discussion with myself about how much I should put those jokes in the footnotes of the book, and how much I should kind of be funny, generally. Because I think the problem is, if you’re funny, people don't think you’re serious. And I think it’s a big problem, particularly for women writers, that actually I think sometimes, and this happens in journalism too, that women writers often play up their seriousness, a sort of uber-serious persona, because they want to be taken seriously. If you see what I mean, it’s very hard to be a foreign policy expert and also have a kind of lively, cheeky side, right? We think that certain things demand a kind of humourlessness to them.But the other thing that I think humour is very important, is it creates complicity with the audience. If you laugh at someone’s joke, you've aligned yourself with them, right? Which is why we now have such a taboo and a prohibition on racist jokes, sexist jokes, whatever they might be, because it’s everyone in the audience against that minority. But that can, again, if you use your powers for good, be quite powerful. I think it is quite powerful to see... There’s one of the suffragettes where someone throws a cabbage at her, and she says something like, “I must return this to the man in the audience who's lost his head.” And given that all the attacks on the suffragettes were that they were these sort of mad, radical, weird, un-feminine, inhuman people, then that was a very good way of instantly saying that you weren’t taking it too seriously.One of the big problems with activism is obviously that people, normal people who don't spend every moment of their life thinking about politics, find it a bit repellent because it is so monomaniacal and all-consuming. And therefore, being able to puncture your pomposity in that way, I think is quite useful.Henry: So if there are people who want to learn from Helen Lewis, “How can I be difficult at work and not be cast aside,” you would say, “Tell more low-grade jokes, get people to like you, and then land them with some difficult remark.”Helen Lewis: Use your powers for good after that. It’s tricky, isn’t it? I think the real answer to how to be difficult at work is decide what level of compromise you’re willing to entertain to get into positions of power. Which is the same question any activist should ask themselves, “How much do I need to engage with the current flawed system in order to change it?” And people can be more or less open with themselves, I guess, about that. I think the recent Obama memoir is quite open about, for example on the financial relief in 2008, about how much he should have tried to be more radical and change stuff, and how much he... Did he actually let himself think he was being this great consensualist working with the Republican Party and therefore not get stuff done?And then the other end, I think you have the criticism I made of the Corbyn project, which was that it was better to have kind of clean hands than get things done. There's a great essay by Matt Bruenig called Purity Politics, which says... No, what is it called? Purity Leftism. And it said, “the purity leftist’s approach is not so much that they're worried about that oppression is happening but that they should have no part of it.” And I think that’s part of the question of being difficult, too, is actually how much do you have to work with and compromise yourself by working with people with whom you're opposed? And it's a big question in feminism. There are people who will now say, “Well, how could feminists possibly work with the Conservative Party?” Entirely forgetting that Emmeline Pankhurst ran as a Conservative candidate.Henry: She was very conservative.Helen Lewis: Right. And there were members of the suffragettes who went on to join the British Union of Fascists. That actually... Some of the core tenets of feminism have been won by people who didn't at all see themselves on the left.Henry: If I was the devil’s advocate, I’d say that well-behaved women, for want of a better phrase, do make a lot of history. Not just suffragists but factory workers, political wives, political mistresses. What’s the balance between needing difficult women and needing not exactly compliant women but people who are going to change it by, as you say, completely engaging with the system and almost just getting on with it?Helen Lewis: There’s a scale, isn’t there? Because if you make yourself too unbelievably difficult, then no one wants to work with you and it's... I think the suffragettes is a really good example of that actually. The intervention of the First World War makes that story impossible to play out without it.But had they continued on that course of becoming ever more militant, ever more bombings, and pouring acid on greens, and snipping telephone wires... The criticism that was made of them was, “Are they actually turning people off this cause?” And you get people saying that, that actually the suffragettes set back the cause of women’s suffrage, which I'm not entirely sure I buy. I think I certainly don’t buy it in the terms of the situation in 1905. Fawcett writes about the fact that there were loads of all these articles decrying the suffragettes, whereas previously they’d just been... The cause of suffrage, which had been going on for 70-80 years, quite in earnest, in legal form, had just been completely ignored. So there was definitely a moment where what it really needed was attention. But then, can you make the same argument in 1914 about whether or not the suffragettes were still doing an equal amount of good? I think then it's much more tenuous.And there was a really good article saying that, essentially your point, well-behaved women do make history, saying that a lot of boring legal heavy-lifting... And it's one of the things I find very interesting about where modern feminism in Britain is. A lot of the work that’s most interesting is being done through things like judicial reviews, which is a lot of very boring pulling together large amounts of court bundles, and people saying, “Is this obiter?” This word which I once understood, and now don't anymore. But it’s not people chaining themselves to railings or throwing themselves under horses. It’s people getting up in the morning and putting another day shift in at quite boring admin. And I do think that maybe that's something that I underplayed in the book because it’s not so narratively captivating. Brenda Hale made that point to me that she would have been a suffragist because she just believed in playing things by the book. You won it by the book.And I do think now I find I don’t agree with throwing paint and pies and milkshakes and stuff like that at people whose political persuasions I disagree with, right? I fundamentally don't believe in punching Nazis, which was a great debate... Do you remember the great Twitter debate of a couple of years ago about whether it’s okay to punch a Nazi? I think if you live in America or the UK, and there are democratic ways and a free press in which to make your political case, you don't need to resort to a riot. And that’s not the case all over the world, obviously. But I do think that I am... I think difficulty takes many, many forms.Henry: A question about Margaret Thatcher.Helen Lewis: Yes.Henry: Was she good for women, even though she wasn't good for feminism? So millions of women joined the labour force in the 1980s, more than before or since. It was the first time that women got their own personal allowance for income tax, rather than being taxed as an extension of their husband’s income.Helen Lewis: I'm trying to remember. Was that a Tory policy?Henry: That was 1988 budget, and it came into effect in 1990. And she also publicly supported. She said, “You should be nice to mothers who go out to work. They're just earning money for their families.” So even though she definitely did not, consciously I think, help the cause of feminism, you would probably rather be a woman in the ’80s than the ’70s...Helen Lewis: Oh yeah, definitely.Henry: But because of her. That's my challenge to you.Helen Lewis: No, it's a good challenge. And I think it's one that has a lot of merit. I’m not sure whether or not she would be grateful to you for positioning her as Margaret Thatcher, feminist hero. And it's really into having... I wrote a screenplay last year about the women in politics in the years before Margaret Thatcher, and it’s very... And I cover this a bit in the book. That women have always struggled in Labour, a collective movement, where it’s like if you let one woman through, you’ve got to let them all. Like, “I’m the vanguard” versus the Thatcher route, which was like, “I’m just me, a person. Judge me on who I am,” and not making such a kind of radical collective claim. So that’s the bit that holds me back from endorsing her as a kind of good thing for women, is I think she was Elizabeth I in the sense where she was like, “I’m good like a man,” rather than saying, “Women are good, and I'm a woman,” which I think are two different propositions. But it’s definitely true that... I think that growing up in a society that had a female prime minister was a huge deal. America still hasn’t had a female president. It’s just not... If you're a girl growing up there, it’s just... That’s something that you’ve never seen. And the other half of it is, I think it was incredibly powerful to see Denis Thatcher. The true feminist hero that is Denis Thatcher. But genuinely, that's somebody who was older than her, who was willing to take a back seat. And he found a role for men that was not being the alpha. It was kind of the, “I don't have anything left to prove. And I like playing golf. Haven't I got a great life while the little woman runs around with her red boxes. All a bit much.” I think that was almost a more radical thing for people to see.And it’s interesting to me that he was somebody who had fought in the Second World War because I think the ’70s and the feminist revolution, I think in some ways depends on there being a generation of men who didn’t have anything to prove, in terms of masculinity. And it’s really interesting to me that... So Barbara Castle’s husband Ted was also, I think, a little bit older than her. But he was also very much in that Denis Thatcher mould of, “Woman! Right, you're exhausting.” And Maureen Colquhoun, who I also write about in the book, her husband Keith was, by all accounts, a very decent guy who was totally accepting of her ambitions. And then he conducted himself with incredible dignity after she left him for a woman. And I think that’s a story that I’m interested in hearing a bit more about, is of the men who weren’t threatened. So I do think that's a big challenge that the Thatchers did present to orthodox values. But let’s not underplay them as conservatives.Henry: Oh no, hugely conservative.Helen Lewis: And also the fact that, to some extent, Margaret Thatcher was reacting to an economic tide that was very useful to her. More women in the workforce meant more productivity, meant higher GDP. And I think it was at that point a train that was just not... Why would you throw yourself in front of it to try and reverse it and get women back into the home?Henry: Her advisors wanted a tax break for marriage.Helen Lewis: Oh, that’s a classic Conservative policy.Henry: Because they said, “We're in office, and this is what we're here for.” And she said, “I can't do it to the mill girls in Bolton. I can't give a tax break to wives in Surrey playing bridge.” And in a way, I think she was very quietly, and as you say for political reasons not entirely openly, quite on the side of the working woman for moral reasons that we would usually call feminist. But which because it’s her and because of everything else she believes, it doesn’t really make sense to call them feminist, but it’s difficult to think of another Prime Minister who has had so much rhetoric saying “Yes, women should go to work, that's a good thing. Don't yell at them about it.” And who has implemented economic policies that's giving them tax breaks and trying to level the playing field a bit. So it’s a sort of conundrum for me that she didn't want to be called a feminist, but she did a lot of things that quotes, if you were that sort of person would say “undermined” the traditional family or whatever.Helen Lewis: Yeah. And she found a way to be a powerful woman and an archetype of what that was, which I think again, is based enormously on Barbara Castle, I think Barbara Castle is the template for her.Henry: Oh yeah. Down to the hair. Yeah.Helen Lewis: With the big hair and the fluttering the eyelashes, and that kind of, what I think of as kind of “Iron Fem” right? Which is where you're very, very feminine, but it's in a steely ball-crushing kind of way. Although interestingly, Barbara Castle cried a lot. She would have frequently burst into tears about stuff, which again was, I think kept the men around her slightly off balance, they didn't know how to... Which I think any good politician uses what they’ve got. But the thing that struck me when I read more about Thatcher last year, was about the fact that if she hadn't been the first female Prime Minister, I think we would write a lot more about her lower-middle middle class background and what a challenge that was. And the fact that that really, in some ways, I think the Tory Party really loved having a female leader once they got over the initial shock because it was kind of like, “Well, aren't we modern. And now Labor can’t have a go at us about all this kind of stuff, 'cause look at our woman leader.” What I think was more of a profound challenge for a long time, was the kind of arriviste sort of idea that she was, as you say, a representative of working people, upwardly mobile, or from right to buy being an example of one of these policies. I think that was a big challenge to the kind of men in smoky rooms.Henry: I don't think they ever got over it. Carrington called her “a f*****g stupid petit-bourgeois woman.”Helen Lewis: Petit-bourgeois is exactly the right, I think the right term of abuse. And there was a... And I think that’s why... I mean, I think it came out as misogyny but actually it was also driven by class as well, the fact that she was no better than she ought to be, right?But that’s about... I think that’s how you see, and honestly I think Ted Heath experiences as a great... Leading to the incredible sulk, one of my favorite phrases, [chuckle] that he just never kind of got over that he had been beaten by a woman. I think that was an extra kind of poisoned pill for him, of the ingratitude of the party, that they would replace him with a woman.Henry: And a woman of his own class.Helen Lewis: Right. And exactly, it’s not like she... So she wasn’t sort of Lady Aster wafting in a cloud of diamonds and violet scent. It was, “Hang on a minute, you're saying this person is better than me.”Henry: Now, before Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Tory Party, almost nobody thought that she was going anywhere, right up to say a week before the leadership election. People would have meetings about who the candidates were and they wouldn't even discuss her. Who are the people in politics today that no one’s really sort of gathered actually have got this big potential?Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting isn't it, that essentially she goes into that leadership context and they sort of think, “Well, someone's gonna shake it up a bit, someone’s gonna represent the right to the party.” And then they go round... And it was Airey Neave who was running her campaign, going around sort of saying, “Well, you know, vote for her, it’ll give Ted a shock.” And then the first ballot result comes in and they go, “Oh God, it’s given us a shock as well.” And then I think at that point, Willy Whitelaw piles in, doesn’t he? But it’s too late and the train’s already moving. And the other one who's... It's Hugh Fraser is the other... And he runs very much from the sort patrician candidate background. I love that, that leadership election, it symbolizes what I like about politics, which is just that sometimes there is a moment, that is a hinge when a force that’s been bubbling away suddenly pops up. And not to get too much into the great man or in this case, a great woman theory history, but someone makes a big decision that is either going to be the right call or the wrong call.And for Margaret Thatcher is almost insanely ambitious, and she could have ended up looking incredibly stupid, and because the life didn’t take that fork in the road, we’ll never look back on that. But there are many people who have made that gamble, and again, go back to failures point, have crashed. You have to have that kind of instinct in politics. Who’s good now? I was just thinking this morning that Bridget Phillipson of Labor, who is now currently shadow education, I think has been underrated for a long time. Finally less so, given that she’s made it to the Shadow Cabinet, who knows if she can make an impression there, but she is smart. So I’ll give you an example, she was asked the inevitable question that all labor politicians are now asked, like, “What is a woman?” And she said, “The correct... “ This is Richard Madeley asked her this. She said, “What to my mind is the correct legal ounce that would also makes sense to normal human beings who don't follow politics all the time, which is, ‘It’s an adult human female or anybody with a gender recognition certificate. And there are difficulties in how you might sometimes put that into practice, but those are the two categories of people.’”And it was like this moment, I was like, Why? Why has it taken you so long to work out an answer to this question that is both correct and explicable. And I think that is an underrated gift in politicians, is actually deciding what issues you’re going to fudge around and which issues you actually have to come out and say what you think even if people disagree with it. It was one of Thatcher’s great strengths, was that she made decisions and she stuck to them. I mean, obviously then you get to the poll tax and it becomes a problem. But I think there’s... One of the problems I felt with the Ed Miliband era of Labor was that he didn't want to annoy anybody and ended up annoying everybody. Wes Streeting, I think is also... No, I won't say underrated, I will say he's now rated and clearly has got his eye on the leadership next.Bridget Phillipson has a much more marginal seat than you'd like to see from somebody who’s going to be a leader. Wes is an interesting character. Grew up on free school meals, has been through cancer in the last couple of years, is gay, has a genuinely kind of... But is also on scene as being on the right to the party. So he’s got lots of different identity factors and political factors that will make people very hard to know where to put him, I think, or how to brand him, I guess. But those are two of the ones who you make me think that there's some interesting stuff happening. On the Tory side, there are some people who are quietly competent. So Michael Gove, I think, whatever you think about his persona or anything like that, is the person they put in when they want stuff actually to happen. I think Nadhim Zahawi did very well as Vaccines Minister without anyone really noticing, which is probably not what you want when you’re a minister, but it’s probably what you want from the public.Henry: Why are so many women late bloomers? Well, obviously, the constraints of having a family or whatever.Helen Lewis: I think the answer is children, I think is the answer to that one.Henry: But there must be other reasons.Helen Lewis: I think... I mean, who knows? I may be straying into territory which is pseudo-science here, but I do also think that menopause is quite important. When you lose all your caring for others, nicely, softly, softly hormones and your hormone profile becomes much more male, I think that makes it easier to not care what people think about you, to some extent. As does the fact that you can no longer be beautiful and play that card. And I don’t know, I think also... Again, this is... I don't know if this is supported by the evidence, I think there's more of... I think more of the men fall away. I don't know, I think if you're a guy who’s found it very hard to form personal relationships, then maybe your 50s and 60s can be quite lonely, whereas I think that’s often the time in which women kind of find a sort of a second wind. Does that make sense? This is all... I mean, none of this is... There's no evidential basis for this, this is just based on my sort of anecdotal reading of people that I’m thinking of.Henry: Camille Paglia once wrote, she put it in very strict terms, she said something like, when the menopause happens, the wife becomes this sort of tyrant and starts flourishing.Helen Lewis: Yeah. No, I’m very much looking forward to that, yeah. Oh yeah.Henry: And the husband becomes this kind of wet rag and his testosterone level drops and the whole power balance just flips. And you're sort of, you’re saying that, but not in quite that... Not as quite an aggressive way as she’s phrased it.Helen Lewis: Yeah, and it’s not a universal truth.Henry: No, no, not at all.Helen Lewis: I just think for the people for whom that happens, that is quite an arresting thing that often gives them the liberation. I also do think there’s a kind of mindset change. I don’t have kids, but I know from women that I know whose kids have gone off to university, that if you have been the primary caregiver, there is suddenly a great, big hole in your life, and what do you fill it with? And actually, do you have to find a new focus and direction and purpose, because you don’t want to be sort of turning up at their halls of residence going, “Hello, just thought I check in, see if you’re alright.” And whereas for men, who’ve maintained a sort of career focus throughout, whilst also adding on a family, that’s not such a kind of big realignment of their day and their life and what they feel the focus of their life is.Henry: I spoke to Tyler Cowen about this and he wondered if there’s something about women become more acceptable in their looks. So you think about Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher as... I think you were sort of implying this, when a woman reaches middle age, the public or the people around them are less likely to judge them on whether they’re good-looking, and so some of that sexism slightly falls away, because when you are a woman in your 20s or 30s, you’re very susceptible to being looked at or rated or whatever, whereas Margaret Thatcher had a sort of, I don’t know, a motherly quality that no one would... There was a kind of cult of finding her attractive and Alan Clark said disgusting things about her.Helen Lewis: Yeah, and also we've had a queen for 70 years, right? So we do have that sort of idea of what female power looks like, which is icy and so it's non-emotional, but yeah.Henry: But I've seen that in the office, that women in their 20s have a difficult time if they’re good looking because there are a certain type of men...Helen Lewis: Well, people assume you’re stupid as well.Henry: Well, and also it’s just what men go to. They talk about you being that, whereas once a woman gets slightly past that, men don’t automatically sort of go, “Oh, how would you rate her out of 10” or whatever? And that creates a space to see them as the person.Helen Lewis: And see them as actual human. I think that's a really interesting thesis. I also think that there’s a... I think being a young woman is a particular kind of problem. So I think there’s definitely a form of ageism against women, where it’s silly old bat, right? Which I do think you get silly old duffer as well, but there is some extra level as well about women, it’s like, “Why are you still talking? No one wants to hear from you? Your... “ This is a phrase they use in the internet now, “You're dusty, you and your dusty opinions.” But I think you get the contrary version of that as a young woman, whereas I think we find... The phrase Young Turk implies man, doesn't it?It’s like, thrusting young guy, on his way up, super ambitious, he’s the new generation, whereas I don’t think you necessarily have that whole sort of coalition of positive stereotypes about young women. It’s untested, learner, still needs to learn the ropes, that kind of... I’m eternally grateful to my boss in my 20s, Jason Cowley of the New Statesman, for making me deputy editor of the Statesman when I was 28, which I think was a pretty radical thing to do. When I don’t think it would have necessarily felt so radical to make a 28-year-old guy.Although I say that, but then Ian Hislop became editor of Private Eye when he was 26, and there was like a revolution among the old guard. And he had to metaphorically execute a few of them outside the woodshed. So I do think that... I also think people begin to... There’s... Now, this is really straying to some dangerous, choppy feminist waters. Competition between women can be very fierce, obviously. I write about this in the book in the terms of Smurfette Syndrome. The idea that there's only one place for a woman, and by God, I’ve got to have it. But I do think that there can be some jealousy that maybe recedes. And I think it’s probably true for men and women. As you get older, people don't see you as a threat because they think, “Well, by the time I’m 40, maybe I'll have all the stuff you have.” But if you’ve got that stuff at 28, I think there’s a real feeling from other people in the generation that those, the stars are peeling away, and there’s a real resentment of them. So one of the things I do is I provide kind of counselling services to young journalists who’ve just suddenly had like a really big promotion or career lift or whatever it is. And I feel indebted to go and say to them, “By the way, this is amazing, but people will hate you because of it.”Henry: It’s very striking to me that we’ve had a period of very young politicians being leaders, but they’re men. And the women who’ve either competed with them or become leaders afterwards are in their 50s. And I do think there’s something about what’s an acceptable public woman.Helen Lewis: And the idea of authority, I think that’s the thing. I think as you get older as a woman, it’s easier to seem authoritative.Henry: Someone like Stella Creasy, I think, has had a much more difficult time just because she happens to be under a certain age.Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that’s interesting. And I think the fact that she's now got very young children at a relatively older age. I know that’s... Sorry. Apologies to Stella, if you're listening. But it is comparatively old to have children after 40, still. That that will be interesting of how that complicates her next decade in politics.And I do think those super top jobs… There was a really brilliant piece of research which I put in the book about the sort of so-called demanding jobs, the kind of lawyers, the top lawyers, and I think journalists and politicians. Greedy jobs, they're called. And the fact is that they have become more demanding in terms of hours as women have entered the workforce. And now the thing has become fetishized as can you do the 14-hour days? And it becomes a soft way of excluding women with young kids.The problem, I think, will come with all of this when both men and women end up needing to look after elderly parents, as we’re having more and more of that extension, those decades at the end of life when you’re alive but maybe you’re not as mobile as you were. Maybe you need more help from your family. And I think there is a lot of anger among certain types of women that they just feel like they’re finally free from their caring responsibilities, and then they get landed with another one. But I know, I’ve been to some feminist conferences recently where... There’s a famous saying which women are the only minority that get more radical with age, which I think is probably true. You can meet some groups of 50-something women, and they are fuming, really fuming. And they’ve now got the time and the sort of social capital with which to exercise that fuming-dom, as it were.Henry: Is Roy Jenkins overrated?Helen Lewis: [laughter] That’s the most random question. He’s not my favourite politician, mainly because I'm Team Castle for life, right? And I think she was treated very badly by the men in that Wilson cabinet, the first, the ’66 to ’70 one, of whom he was one, right? I think that, yeah. I think... Do you know what? I haven't got very strong opinions on him compared with my strong opinions on James Callaghan, who I am anti. And I know there are some Callaghan-stans out there. But I think the utterly cynical way in which he sucked up to the unions in order to get the leadership at the cost, ultimately, of then Margaret Thatcher in ’79, out-strikes me as one of the most sort of cynical pieces of politicking.Henry: You are sailing very close to being a Thatcherite.Helen Lewis: I'm not a Thatcherite. I'm not.Henry: No, I know.Helen Lewis: But I can see... I think you... And I think Rachel Reeves has basically written about this, who's now Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, that if Barbara Castle had succeeded with In Place of Strife on what were, now, to us, very mild measures, right? A conciliation pause where you have negotiations, strike ballots, no wildcat strikes. If she’d managed to push through some of those, then some of the excesses of the ’70s would not have happened. Or at least, Labour would have been able to show that it had a grip of them. But you have a situation where the teachers were asking for something like 25% pay rise in the run up to the ’79 election. And the Labour government just looked completely out of control. And so yeah, that’s my Callaghan beef. What's your Roy Jenkins beef, then?Henry: I don’t have beef. I can’t remember why I wrote that question. I read about him in your book. I suppose I think that he did implement some good progressive measures, but that he was essentially a sort of patrician wannabe. And that his whole career in politics is much more middling and establishment, and his radicalism was... I don't know. Perhaps overrated, when we look back.Helen Lewis: Well, I will go away and read some more. I read quite a lot of the... The mad thing about the cabinet, particularly in that Wilson government, is that they were all obviously sitting there writing copious amounts of... To the extent that Barbara Castle would actually write literal notes in cabinet, save it for diary later on. But Tony Benn was writing notes. Crossman was writing notes. Jenkins essentially wrote lots of... A very full memoir. Harold Wilson wrote one of the most boring memoirs that the world has ever seen. The trade union leaders wrote memoirs. Jack Jones wrote a memoir. It was an astonishingly literate and writerly sort of set of people. And yet the cabinet was, in some respects, kind of utterly dysfunctional, but with Wilson still running a sort of... You know, sort of like who was kind of currently had been nice to me. And he went... And of course in his second term, he became incredibly paranoid.It was not a model of good government really. And again, Callaghan is one of the greatest political resurrections ever, right, when he completely screws up the Treasury and then uses Northern Ireland's Home Secretary in order to kind of make himself back into a respectful mainstream figure. But before we go and fight Roy Jenkins-stans, we should both go and find out what our beef is with him.Henry: I'm gonna say her name, well, Colquhoun?Helen Lewis: Colquhoun.Henry: Colquhoun. She said, “Labor would rather fight Powell than solve poverty.” Is that still true?Helen Lewis: What read it out there is a phrase that I think Maureen Colquhoun said after not “the rivers of blood” speech, but another Enoch Powell speech in the ’70s, which got her in enormous trouble. Would you like to endorse this sentiment that got her called a racist? And it was used as a pretext for drumming her out of the Labor party. So what happened to Maureen after that is that she... Her local party tried to de-select her, it then went to an appeal at the NEC. She eventually ended up holding on to her candidacy and then she lost in ’79 to a guy called Tony Marlow, who’s one of the most... Talk about Thatcher, I mean... He was bristly, to the extent that his nickname was Tony von Marlow. But yeah, he has some terrible quote about Harriet Harman as well, which is something like, “These bra burners have got a chip on their shoulder,” or something. It was something terrible mixed metaphor involving how you couldn’t wear a bra if you also had a chip on your shoulder. Anyway, I digress.Henry: I’m not trying to endorse her quote, but if you replace Powell with Boris.Helen Lewis: I think it’s a really interesting quote about... It comes back to purity leftism, what we were talking about before, is actually, “Do you want the win or do you want the fight?” And there is, I think, more of a tendency on the left than the right, to want to be on the right side of history, to want to be pure, to want to be fighting, and that sort of sense that... The perpetual struggle is the bit that you want to be in, that's the bit that’s exciting, rather than the win. I think one of the really interesting sounds to me is gay marriage. I was just reading this Jonathan Rauch piece this morning about the fact that... His argument being, that there was a coalition of kind of right-wingers and centrists and liberals in America who fought with the radical left, who wanted gay rights to be predicated on the idea of sort of smashing the nuclear family and everything like that, to say, “Let’s make gay rights really boring, and let's talk a lot about how much we want to get married. And maybe we wanna adopt. Let’s recruit all the people who happen to have been born gay, but are also Tories or Republicans.”And I think a similar thing happened to him here, where you have David Cameron saying, “I support gay marriage not in spite of being a conservative, but because I’m conservative.” And you frame it as essentially a very norm-y, boring thing. And I think that has been really interesting to watch in the sense of... I think that's why gender is now come much more to the fore because it's a sense that, “Well, if even Tories are okay with people being gay, it’s not... Like what's left? How is that interesting anymore?” And so, I think the criticism that she was trying to make there is very true in the sense that sometimes Labor wants to look right more than it wants to win a halfway victory.Henry: What are some of the best or most underrated biographies of women?Helen Lewis: That’s a really interesting question. I read a lot of royal biographies, so I very much like Leonie Frieda’s biography of Catherine de' Medici, for example. There is also... You’re gonna think this is terrible, Princess Michael of Kent wrote a joint biography of Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henry II, which is called The Serpent and the Moon, which is a really... I think it's... Actually, it’s not a bad biography, but I think it’s quite interesting to write a biography of the wife and the mistress together.Henry: Yeah, I think that’s a great idea.Helen Lewis: Because the story of them is obviously so intertwined and their power relationship obviously changes, right? Because Catherine is the dowdy wife who bears the 10 children, Diane is the kind of unbelievably gorgeous, older woman. But then of course, the king dies and it’s like, “Oh, nice chateau you've got there. Shame, one of us is the dowager queen and one of us is now just some woman,” and makes her hand back her Chenonceau to her. So I enjoyed that very much. I’m trying to think what the best political women biographies are. Do you have a favourite Elizabeth I biography? I think there must be a really great one out there but I can’t... I don't know which one actually is best.Henry: Well, I like the one by Elizabeth Jenkins, but it’s now quite out of date and I don’t know how true it is anymore. But it’s, just as a piece of writing and a piece of advocacy for Elizabeth, it’s an excellent book. And it sold, it was sort of a big best seller in 1956, which I find a very compelling argument for reading a book, but I appreciate that a lot of other people might not.Helen Lewis: No, that's not to everyone’s taste. That’s interesting. I like Antonia Fraser as a biographer. I don't know if you'‘e got a strong feelings, pro or anti. Her Mary Queen of Scots book is very good. Her Mari Antoinette book is very good. And I actually, I interviewed her once about how she felt about the Sofia Coppola film, which is basically like a two-and a half hour music video. She was totally relaxed, she was like, “It's a film, I wrote a book.”She didn't say it like that, she didn't go, “Film innit,” sucking on a roll-up, she said it in a very lofty, Antonia Fraser kind of way. But I think that’s a good thing if you’re an author, to kind of go, “What works in a biography is not what works in a film,” so...But yeah, I grew up reading those Jean Plaidy historical novels, so I guess I read a lot of biographies of Queens. I’m trying to think whether or not I read any biographies of modern women. I haven’t read... I have on my shelf the, Red Comet, the Sylvia Plath biography. And I also, which is on my to-read pile, as is the biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas by Janet Malcom, which I one day, will treat myself to. Henry: What are the best or most underrated biographies by women?Helen Lewis: By women? Well, again, then we go back to...Henry: I mean, you’ve named some of them, maybe.Helen Lewis: The interesting thing is, I remember when I did Great Lives, they said... The Radio 4 program about history. That they said, the one thing that they have tried to encourage more of, is men nominating women. Because they found there was no problem with getting women to nominate men and men to nominate men, but they found there weren't that many men who picked women, which I think is interesting. I really wanted, when Difficult Women came out, I wanted a man to review it.Henry: Did that not happen?Helen Lewis: No, it didn’t happen. And I think everybody would’ve... I think, from the point of view of your male reviewers, why would you review a book on feminism when you're gonna get loads of people going, “Ew, what are you doing?mansplaining feminism?” But it’s an intellectual project, right? It’s not a... It should be open to criticism by absolutely anyone, not on... You don't have to pass an identity test. It’s an ideology and a school of history. And so I would... What's the best biography of woman written by a man, is kind of a question I'm interested in.Henry: Yes. That’s very difficult to think of.Helen Lewis: And how many of them are there? Because it just strikes me that when I'm naming all my women, biographies of women, that they’re all by women.Henry: Yes. It’s difficult to think... It'‘ easy to think of biographies of men written by women.Helen Lewis: Right. Hermoine Lee's out there repping for Tom Stoppard biography recently. But yeah, people can send in answers on a postcard for that one.Henry: Should there be less credentialism in journalism?Helen Lewis: Yes. I started as a sub-editor on the Daily Mail. And I worked alongside lots of older guys who had come up through local papers at the time when the trade unions were so strong that you had to do two years on local paper before you got to Fleet Street. And therefore, I worked with quite a lot of people who had left school at either 16 or 18 and were better at subbing than people who’d... than recent university graduates. And so, the way that journalism has become first of all, a graduate profession and now a postgraduate profession, I don’t think it’s got any real relationship to the quality of journalism. There are a sort of set of skills that you need to learn, but a lot of them are more about things like critical thinking than they are about literature, if you see what I mean?That’s the thing. That is what I find very interesting about journalism, is the interesting marriage of... You have to have the personal relationships, you have to be able to find people and make them want to be interviewed by you and get the best out of them. Then you have to be able to write it up in prose that other humans can understand. But then there is also a level of rigour underneath it that you have to have, in terms of your note-keeping and record-keeping and knowledge of the law and all that kind of stuff. But none of that maps onto any kind of degree course that you might be able to take. And so, I think that’s... And the other huge problem, I think in journalism is that, everyone in the world wants to do it, or at least that’s how it seems when you’re advertising for an entry level position in journalism.When I was at the New Statesman, we used to recruit for editorial assistants and I once had 250 applications for a single post, which was paid a fine amount, you could live on it just about in London, but was not... It was a plum job in intellectual terms, but not in economic terms. And I think that’s a real problem because I could have filled every position that we had, with only people who’d got Firsts from Oxford or whatever it might be. But it wouldn't have been the best selection of journalists.Henry: No. Quite the opposite.[laughter]Helen Lewis: Yes. I enjoy your anti-Oxford prejudice. [chuckle] But you know what I mean is that I... But the fact that you had to have at least a degree to even get through the door, is sort of wrong in some profound way. And actually, some of the places have been... I think Sky did a non-graduate traineeship for people who were school leavers. And I think that there are profound problems in lots of those creative arts, publishing is the same, academia is the same, where you could fill every job which is low paid, and in London, with middle-class people whose parents are willing to fund them through. And the credentialism just is a further problem in that it just knocks out bright people from perfectly normal economic backgrounds.Henry: Do you think as well, that in a way, the main criteria for a good journalist, whether they're a sub-editor, or writing leaders or whatever, is common sense? And that a good English degree is really no guarantee that you have common sense.[laughter]Helen Lewis: Yeah. I couldn’t put my hand in my heart and say that everybody I know with an English degree demonstrates common sense. I think that is actually not a bad... The famous thing is about you need a rat-like cunning, don’t you? Which I think is also pretty true. But yeah, you do need to come back to that kind of idea about heresy and you do need to have a sort of sniffometer, not to be... I think you need to be fundamentally cynical, but not to a point where it poisons you.The right amount of cynicism is probably the thing you need in journalism. Because my husband's a journalist and quite often, there'll be a story where we just go, “I don't believe that. I just don't believe that.”And it really troubles me that that’s become harder and harder to say. So I wrote a piece a while ago, about TikTok and people who claim to have Tourette’s on there and actually quite a lot of them might have something else, might have functional neurological disorder. But there are whole genres of that all across journalism, where people will talk very personally and very painfully about their personal experiences. And the other half of that is that, we are not... It’s mean, to question that. But they’re often making political claims on the basis of those experiences. And you therefore can’t put them in a realm beyond scrutiny. And so it’s interesting to me, having been a teenager in the ’90s when journalism was incredibly cruel. I’m talking about the height of bad tabloid, going through people’s bins, hate campaigns against people. And a lot of this “be kind” rhetoric is a response to that and a necessary correction, but I do think there are now, lots of situations in which journalists need to be a bit less kind. That's a terrible quote. [laughter] But do you know what I mean?Henry: I do know exactly what you mean.Helen Lewis: When you have to say, “I know you think you've got this illness, but you haven't.” That's tough.Henry: People need to be more difficult.Helen Lewis: That's always my marketing strategy, yes.Henry: I want to ask if you think that you are yourself a late bloomer? In the tone of voice that you write in, you very often... You write like an Atlantic journalist and there are these moments, I think, of real wit. I don't mean jokey. I mean, clever. And so, a line like, “Your vagina is not a democracy,” is very funny but it's also very...Helen Lewis: It’s true.Henry: Sort of Alexander Pope-ish.[laughter]Helen Lewis: That’s the best possible reference. Yes, I hope to write very mean epigrams about people, one day.Henry: Please do. But you can also be very jokey like when you said, I think in a footnote, that you don't watch porn because the sofas are so bad.Helen Lewis: True.Henry: Now, there is something in those moments of wit that I think suggest that you could, if you wanted to, go and do something other than what you’ve already done. Maybe like Charles Moore, you’d become a biographer, or maybe you'd become a novelist, or maybe you’ll run a think tank, or maybe you’ll set up a newspaper and only employ 16-year-old school leavers, or... I don’t know. Is that how you think about yourself or am I...Helen Lewis: You are trying to tell me I need to just grow up.[laughter]Henry: Not at all.Helen Lewis: Stop clowning around like a sea lion for applause after throwing fish.Henry: My theory on Helen Lewis is, you’ve got all the accolades that someone could want from a journalistic career.Helen Lewis: Not true. I’ve only ever won one award for journalism and you’ll love this, it was Mainstream Video Games Writer of the Year.Henry: Oh my god.Helen Lewis: That’s it. From the Games Awards in 2013, which I only remember this because every so often my publisher will put award-winning journalist as a merit that I have. Not really gov, not if I'm honest. You're right though. I have one of the plum jobs in journalism which is I work three days a week at the Atlantic, and then I make radio documentaries on the side and write books, and that is a position which is enormously enviable. But I have also... So I’ve moved away from column writing, in the last couple of years — I used to write a regular op-ed column — because I found it a deeply unsatisfying form. And I think, when you do jokes, you begin to realize that you can actually just say stupid, easy clap lines and with sufficient confidence, and people will respond to them, and after a while, you begin to hate yourself for doing that.[laughter]Well, that's one of the reasons I again... Like getting off Twitter. You know what I mean? You see some of those accounts that just exists to do lazy little dunks about the people that are appointed, that are sort of designated hate subjects. So if someone gets designated as a hate subject, then you can say nasty things about them and then everybody will applaud you. And I fundamentally revolt from that and I don't like it.I think that as a journalist, you should always try and be at right angles to whatever the prevailing opinion is. And actually as I've got older, I value the sort of... The people I think of as contrarians who I think really believe it rather than the people who are doing it for effect. Someone like a Peter Hitchens. He’s got a whole ideology that’s very much not mine and a set of interesting opinions and he believes them, and he truly argues them, and although they... Whether or not they’re popular or unpopular is of no interest to him, that’s what he believes. And I distinguish that from other people I think are opportunists who end up tacking where they see that... And a lot of the anti-woke people end up in that space where they just... That’s the little niche where you can get kind of clapter. And so I really do think that’s the point of journalism, but... Yeah, I take your point. I think I feel I’ve exhausted having glib opinions at short notice. And that’s not something that I'm interested in.Henry: So there might be a second act where we see a whole new Helen Lewis?Helen Lewis: Well as I say, I wrote a screen play last year and I’m now having meetings with TV companies. And I certainly at the Atlantic, have moved to writing much less than I used to and then much weirder stuff and much more in-depth. So I’ve got a piece that's coming out in the magazine this month which is about Europe’s ex-Royals and what they do. What do you do when you should be Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but there’s no Austro-Hungarian Empire, right? Or you should be king of Albania but Albania doesn't have a king anymore. And I thought this is really weird. I get to interview a Habsburg, which is basically the pinnacle of my life.[laughter]It’s all I've ever wanted from journalism. But to do that kind of stuff is interesting. But you’re writing a book so you are just about to embark on the fact that writing a book is the worst possible thing that you can do to yourself. Because it’s like torture, probably to no end, that you've chosen freely. So you literally got no-one to complain to. When... On the day when you’re like, you just cannot focus on writing your book, no one wants to hear it. My granddad went down a mine. That’s a job you can complain about. I have to sit in the library and try and think how these two ideas connect in my mind. No-one cares. The tiniest violin is even then too big for that complaint. But I like the idea of being a late bloomer. What I like more, I guess, and bloomer makes you imply that you're somehow bigger. I think it's more about being different.And my best friend, Laura’s had the most amazing career. So she did PPE at University and then she went to work for KPMG and then she went to work... To Teach First, then she became a teacher and she taught at schools in East London for a while. Then she took... Started working a PhD about Charter schools, then she took Michael Gove to court. Then she founded a newspaper about education, now she’s founded an app that surveys teachers. And it all has a coherence to it, right? It’s all in the same genre, she's obviously interested in education. But at no point has she ever thought, “Right, that's it, that's me. Done. I'll see you at 65 when we... For some golf and gardening.” It's always been about, “How can I keep moving?” She’s the shark of education. And I think that's true, and if you don't have kids, she doesn’t and I don't, you have the luxury to be able to do that, and therefore you should keep moving on and... But I do think it’s... Don’t you think that people want to be able to categorize you?Henry: Yes, it can be very career-limiting to do different things. Depending on what sort of career you want. Whether you care about what other people think is the critical effect.Helen Lewis: Yeah. I think if I wanted to win lots of awards and or have a nice well paid life, I would just keep writing the same book about feminism 90 times, and then people will be like, “Oh that's... We need to get the feminist speaker in. Who’s the feminist speaker? It's Helen.” So I think you have a more interesting career. But it’s interesting, which writers... Penelope Fitzgerald, who I know you love too...Henry: Yes.Helen Lewis: She writes a different book every time.Henry: Yes, although there’s a sort of continuity in the type of characters and the weirdness of her settings, even though the actual places are very different. So she’s not quite one of those novelists who really does move from one thing into another and you can't...Helen Lewis: Yes, some sort of baroque revenge drama to then suddenly writing a kind of realist detective fiction and you go, “What?”Henry: But that definitely meant that reviewers and sort of all the highbrows who were enjoying Martin Amis at that time, it gave them another reason to say, “Who is this old woman and what are her books? I don't understand.”Helen Lewis: Why is this one on a boat? Obviously, yeah.Henry: “Why is she not Salman Rushdie?” That made it very easy for them to do that to her.Helen Lewis: Yeah. And I think that’s probably what happens in journalism too. Columnists tend to last for an incredibly long time because people just sort of have a familiarity to them. And I used to think that was kind of... I would read the Richard Littlejohn column and be like, “He’s written this column again?” But then I realized that people quite like the... They want to know what a Richard Littlejohn column is and what all of his opinions are going to be.Henry: Might it be different now, because you've got people who read your newsletter who are more interested in you than in, “Oh, I want another Helen Lewis column.” And if you did turn around...Helen Lewis: No one has ever said, but go on.Henry: Well, no. I think there'‘s a certain truth to... You have more control over your audience then just it being the people who read the Atlantic because they get what they get. If you did turn around and say, “I’m going to write a history of Sardinia,” or whatever. Something totally sort of, “I'm going to write a history of defunct royals or I'm going to be a playwright.” They might go, “Great. I'm in it for what Helen Lewis is doing,” and I don't know, it might be easier to have that sort of career now.Helen Lewis: I think that’s interesting. I think maybe is true as well, because I think writers now do become brands and there's a version in economics, this idea of superstar theory, where it’s become very hard to be like a mid-level musician.But if you’re Taylor Swift and Beyonce, you're making better money than anyone ever made. And I think a similar thing has happened with journalism. If you look at Substack, if you’re Bari Weiss or Andrew Sullivan or one of the top, Matt Yglesias, one of the top people, you’re earning millions. Far more than you would have got from a staff job at a paper and you are the brand. But at the same time, it’s actually... I would say, the wages have stagnated enormously for a kind of sub-editor on a paper. It just hasn’t gone up at all, and inflation is just eating it away. And so, I think there is a big reason to be a brand, much though the word makes me want to cry.Henry: And in a way, what that argues for is to say, “Well, if I'm not going to be Matt Yglesias and make x millions, I should do lots of different things, because otherwise I'll get caught in being the same. In 10 years, I'll turn around and say, “God, I'm still doing this and I'm not a millionaire.””Helen Lewis: But that’s it, but I don't know why you want to write, but the reason I want to write is that I’m incredibly nosy and I love finding stuff out. Nothing makes me happier than the idea of finding stuff out, and even more so if I can then find people who will listen to me, telling them the thing that I just found out. And why would you want to not... Being curious and having licensed curiosity, I like nothing more than getting off a plane somewhere new and weird and being like, “Well, this is all different. The cups are different, and I'm going...”[laughter]Whatever it might be, that you're just going to immerse yourself, and I feel like that about reading history as well. When you just suddenly find out about what it was like to... Tudor toilets were like. It's sort of mind-blowing that you go, Why, even the toilets were different, which of course they were, but that’s to me, the point of writing. There are any number of things that are easier, better paid, have better hours, whatever it might be, than writing. But the thing you get with writing is that, you get to keep moving and keep digging new soil.Henry: That's why I'm wondering if you might turn around and become a historical novelist or a biographer of a defunct Habsburgs. Royal biography sells very well.Helen Lewis: It’s true.Henry: Especially in America.Helen Lewis: But I don’t... I speak a bit of German and I speak slightly better French, so Royal biographer is tough. I feel like all the British royals have really been kicked to death, at this point. Mary II, that’s an underrated...Henry: Very underrated.Helen Lewis: Royal biography. Perhaps I can write that. But I have been enjoying trying to write screenplays. It’s a very different discipline because you have to... But it’s all about hard decisions. You have to make the hard decisions, and you have to put your characters in places where they make hard decisions, and each time, you’re like a tiny... Like a judge banging a tiny gavel about [laughter] deciding what an incident means or who was in the wrong or who was in the right. So it does force you to take positions, I think, which is not something that... Something I feel like I’ve cleaved away from. There’s someone that did a thing about why young people write... It was maybe even you. Did you mention this? That young people write better rock songs?Because they're very certain about what's wrong and what's right and they're very angry and they're angry and the same thing that the guy behind Slate Star Codex has written about one of the things that happens with bipolar people is, you tend to get less. I think it's about, is it bipolar or is it borderline personality? Maybe it’s borderline, where people tend to... One of the things that ameliorates it is age, because we generally will become more stable and grounded and boring. And at 50, you’re not seeing some guy on the bus and immediately falling in love and writing poetry about him. And I think the same thing has happened to me in terms of my career. I feel a lot less certain about stuff and I’m not as interested in putting forward my incredibly strong opinions on stuff. And I wonder if that’s a reaction to social media or I wonder if that’s just, “I'm going old. I'm now in my nuance era.” [laughter] I’ve entered my nuance years. And have you entered your nuance years or were you always in them?Henry: I think I’ve been here for a long time, I’m afraid. I’ve been told that I’ve been old for a long time.Helen Lewis: I was an angry young woman, I guess, and I just maybe I have mellowed.Henry: Helen Lewis, thank you very much.Helen Lewis: Thank you very much for having me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

I was very pleased to talk to Charles Moore, who I have read admiringly for many years. His three volume biography of Margaret Thatcher is one of the most interesting biographies published in the last few years. He also edited a volume of T.E.Utley’s journalism. In this discussion you will hear (or read the transcript below!) whether Margaret Thatcher is more left-wing than we think, what Charles thinks of political biography, how his footnotes work, who are the most underrated Thatcher cabinet ministers, the relationship between fiction and biography, why he’s not a natural Thatcherite, and more. I asked a lot of my questions much less elegantly than I had written them, but the answers are frequently models of spoken English. I particularly enjoyed Charles’ use of “jealous” in its original, perhaps now semi-archaic, meaning (i.e. suspiciously vigilant or careful). He also seems to use “cunning” in the way Johnson defined it, pleasingly. I remember reading once how much Charles enjoyed the language of the Book of Common Prayer as a child. Perhaps those lexicographical waters run deep. The transcript is lightly edited for intelligibility. You will notice, sometimes, that the transcript moves from past to present tense when Charles talks about Margaret Thatcher. Here, as elsewhere, he often refers to her in the present tense. One topic we didn’t cover was Margaret Thatcher as a late bloomer. Maybe another time.Henry: You once wrote that you found political biography boring to read, or you used to. Why did you find it interesting to write?Charles Moore: I think making one's own enquiries makes you think about it more deeply, which is intrinsically interesting. But also I think the subject, Mrs. Thatcher, is a particularly interesting person because she was very unusual and because she was the first and, effectively at the time, only woman. And so everything's different. And so the impact of her is very strikingly different from that of even very well-known male politicians.Henry: And do you enjoy reading political biography more now that you've written your book?Charles Moore: I don't find that I do read it more, particularly. But probably the answer's yes because I can understand more how the work is done. And therefore, I can see who's good at it and who isn't, and when they're evading a subject they don't understand or whether they've really got to the bottom of it and so on.Henry: How do you assess that? What sort of things make you think that someone's really got a grip on what they're telling you?Charles Moore: Partly it's their mastery of the sources, of course. And also, it's a matter of, to some extent, perceiving their fairness. And I think that's quite an interesting subject, because fairness doesn't mean, necessarily, that you're neutral about the person. You can be highly sympathetic to the subject, or you can be even unsympathetic to the subject and still be fair. But fairness is something about considering the evidence and trying to give it its right weight. This, I think, is easily detectable in biographies. And some just don't do that. They wish to assassinate the character, or they wish to make a hero of the character, or they're simply rather lazy. If you've walked down that path, you can detect what's going on.Henry: What parts of Margaret Thatcher's life did you find it most difficult to be fair about?Charles Moore: Well of course, I wouldn't be the best judge of that, I suppose.Henry: Were there any bits, though, where you had to work at that practise of fairness?Charles Moore: One way in which you need to be fair to a subject is simply to try to understand the subject. I don't mean the biographical subject. I mean the issue. And there are certain subjects that I'm less good at and, therefore, have to work harder on like, let's say, monetary policy or details about missiles. Neither of which are my natural territory, and both of which are important in the case of Mrs. Thatcher. So I would have to make more efforts about that, mental efforts, to really understand what's going on than I would about, say, fighting an election or reform of the trade unions or something like that. There's a sort of broad point about being fair, which is that biography naturally and inevitably and rightly must focus on the individual. And therefore, it may do that to the exclusion of other individuals or of a wider milieu, which is an inevitable danger but is also a mistake because the individual in politics doesn't act alone, even a very remarkable character like Margaret Thatcher or Winston Churchill. And one needs, somehow, to convey the milieu and the weight of the other characters while never ceasing to focus on the one character.One of the extraordinary features of Hilary Mantel's novels about Thomas Cromwell — Wolf Hall etc — is that, I think it's right to say, he is in the room the entire time, or in the field or whatever. I think Thomas Cromwell is in every scene. Sometimes it's reported speech that he's hearing, but still. And, as a biographer one sort of does that. Mrs. Thatcher is almost always in the room, not absolutely always. And that's right. That's fine. But one mustn't let her crowd everything else out.Henry: Were the Mantel books a conscious model or influence for you, or is that something you've noticed separately?Charles Moore: Not really because I was reading them more towards the end. Well, I read Wolf Hall quite a long time ago, and then I read the other two pretty much when I was finishing. But I think they're very good. Obviously, they're not biographies. But I think, I hope, I learnt something from them because there's a sustained effort of the imagination, which the novelist has to have, to see through the eyes of, in her case, Thomas Cromwell. And though biography is fact not fiction, imagination is required in biography as well. And so in some ways, it's a similar task.Henry: On this question of the milieu that Margaret Thatcher was in, you paid a lot of attention in the three books to the biographies of all the people around her, especially in footnotes, but also when you're describing events such as the leadership election in 1990, there's a lot of biographic information. Is this compilation of brief lives, a way of providing not just information, but commentary, almost like a sort of prosopographia? What stood out to me was that, even just through the footnotes, it really details the way that she was very, very different to everyone else in that world, demographically and socially.Charles Moore: Yes. That's right. So, in putting footnoted autobiographies of most of the characters, that's useful for reference, but it's also a sort of short-hand way of telling you about the milieu and the range of characters she was dealing with, and of course, it brings out the fact that they're almost all male and a very high percentage of them went to public schools and Oxford or Cambridge. She of course went to Oxford, but she didn't go to public school and she wasn't a man. So I think when your eye goes to bottom of the page and picks up one of those biographies, it should be helpful in its own right, but it also should have a cumulative effect of placing Mrs. Thatcher among all of these people and of course, rather like the only woman in the room is very noticeable physically, she's very noticeable as unique in this milieu.Henry: Is that a technique that you took from somewhere, or is that something that you devised yourself?Charles Moore: Well, I think she devised it to some extent, and I picked up on that. She always had to wrestle with the point that it was considered a disadvantage to be a woman in the world in which she was moving. And she realized that though in certain respects it was objectively a disadvantage because of prejudice and so on, she could turn it to advantage. And I think one thing she understood very early on, because though she's a very sincere person she's also a very good actress, is that she could see the almost filmic quality of her position. So she would know that the camera would come in on her, and therefore she should exploit that to the full with her hair, her bag, her dresses, the sense of being different and noticeable, her voice. And she put that to good use and tried to refine that and simplify it really so that it could have maximum impact.Henry: There was a High Tory ambivalence about Margaret Thatcher, so someone like T.E Utley was a supporter, but not a complete supporter, a slightly guarded pro-Thatcher. And I think you potentially fall into this group, not entirely aligned with the Thatcher government on Ireland, Hong Kong for example. How did this position affect you as her biographer?Charles Moore: I don't think my own specific views on political questions were so important in that, but I think perhaps my overall approach affected it. What I mean by that is that my background, I'm actually brought up as a liberal with a big “L” — Liberal Party. And by cultural inclination I wouldn't be a natural Thatcherite, and I would always look at Mrs. Thatcher as somebody different from my way of thinking in that sense, which of course makes that very interesting. I'm not part of her tribe, and wasn't by upbringing, and I hope that's useful because it gives a certain historical detachment. However I wasn't trying to write an interpretation of Mrs. Thatcher coming from my tribe, it wasn't like the Whig interpretation of history sort of thing. And indeed, in some ways, I was more impressed by her because I came from a different tribe, that's to say, she had to overcome more barriers in my mind, perhaps. Suppose I'd been writing a biography of Asquith, that would have been more like the world I grew up in, and perhaps less of a challenge. And writing about Mrs. Thatcher, it's exciting to enter a world which in social terms and political terms, and of course, a different sex as well, was less known to me.Henry: I think you wrote that she is, with the possible exception of Jim Callaghan, the most socially conservative Prime Minister that Britain has had. To what extent do your background and your personal views make it easy or difficult for you to be, as you said earlier, fair in the way that you presented that?Charles Moore: She's a very odd mixture in that way. I think I perhaps did write that. But of course, she also was such a change bringer. If you think of Mrs. Thatcher's natural demeanour and reactions, she would be very socially conservative. I mean not ultra socially conservative. For example, she married a divorcee, which was quite unusual in 1951. But a fairly conventional Christian, starting as a Methodist and sort of sliding gradually into Anglicanism as she rises up the social scale without ever abandoning Methodism. Believing strongly in firm punishments for criminals. A very uncomplicated monarchist. No problem about hereditary peers in her mind, etcetera, etcetera. Very fond of obvious traditional British things like the armed services, support for the police, all that sort of thing. And things like traditional high standards in school of a rigorous kind. So on and so on, all those things. But in another way, she's so impatient to change things and unafraid of challenging whatever it is that people usually go around saying. So it's a curious combination and an interesting one. For me, I don't remember that presenting a particular fairness issue. It's just this funny thing about her, which is also biographically very interesting, that she's very, very conservative and very, very radical.Henry: Do you think the fact that you have religious belief. Do you think that had any part in the consideration to pick you as the biographer? I think you've said before, you don't really know why she chose you.Charles Moore: No, I wouldn't have thought that it did have any consideration. Mrs. Thatcher's religion was quite vague, and she wasn't interested at all in ecclesiastical or theological questions. But one of the things she respected in religion was some sort of seriousness about ultimate purpose. And she certainly had such a seriousness herself. And I remember talking to her about that. This is before I was engaged in the work, I think just in conversation. I had recently become a Catholic, and she talked about that. This is another interesting example of her, in some ways, rather open mind because she's fundamentally brought up anti-Catholic as most English Protestants were. And I don't think she would ever have considered becoming a Catholic. But I remember her being rather pleased that I had become a Catholic because she thought this is a proper serious Christian thing to do, and it was something she respected. She felt this about Jews too, obviously they weren't Christians. But again, she had a respect for Judaism and Judaic law and custom and manners and thought. And that was something which she recognised and liked in other people.Henry: Margaret Thatcher is sometimes thought of, or dismissively described, as un-philosophical. You said in your prefaces that she would confound Socrates with her lack of reflection on her own life. But in some ways she was quite an ideological person, at certain times, about freedom and things. Is the difference between being philosophical and ideological really so great? And was she really living if not a philosophically reflective life, a very philosophical life in what you've just been saying about seriousness and purpose? Is she more philosophical than she looks?Charles Moore: Yes. Good way to think about it, I think. Alfred Sherman, with whom she fell out but who was close to her in the '70s, said that “she is not a person of ideas but a person of beliefs.” And beliefs, he said, are better than ideas. I think he meant better from a political point of view, for politics. And I think that's sort of right. So there was a sense in which Mrs. Thatcher was philosophical, which was that her mind was an enquiring one. And she was always thinking, thinking, thinking. “What's right here? What's the best? What's the problem? What's the solution?” But she didn't have the philosopher's sceptical mind or pure intellectualism. She wanted results. And she wanted good things to happen and bad things to be stopped. And so she did have what you could call a philosophy, but she was not a philosopher. She was a person of action and beliefs.Henry: I heard an interview with you recently where you, I'm going to paraphrase, you said something like the limitation of left-wing political thought is that it has a utopian belief in politics. As in, if everybody only could have the right politics, everything would be okay. And you've written and talked about Margaret Thatcher trying to create a Christian Social Order in Britain. And that's really the drive she had. Is she, in that sense, a bit more of a "left-wing" political thinker, with a more utopian vision, than we would typically think of her as being?Charles Moore: There is an element of that because she is partly a preacher in politics. There's an element of, some sense in her mind of building Jerusalem or rebuilding Jerusalem, I think is there. And that tends to be more associated with socialism and, indeed with certain forms of Protestant Christianity going back, than with conservatism. So there is something of that. However, one of her beliefs, which was true — I mean, which she did adhere to — was that politics doesn't contain the solutions of everything, because people do not political structures. And she did believe that. Though of course, she also, because she was very egotistical, she did believe that something which she ran was bound to be good. So she could accommodate. People said she was very intolerant of other ideas. She was certainly very argumentative. But for example, she respected the Labour Party. She didn't respect the Liberal Party, but she respected the Labour Party because she thought that it represented something in Britain that ought to be represented and that conservatism didn't really represent, the way she put it was that it was the party of the underdog. And she thought there should be a party of the underdog.And her own approach to the problem of people who are less successful and poorer and things like that was to open up their opportunities. But I think within that was also a sort of acknowledgement that not everybody can take those opportunities. And for those people, it's important that there be a party that represents their interests. And she thought that Labour was the party to do that. So that shows a certain sense that, “I, Margaret Thatcher, don't have the answer to everything. I'm trying to do a particular set of things, and I believe I can do this right. But life is bigger than that, and politics is bigger than that.”Henry: On the question of her being argumentative, or however you want to phrase it, you have that great memo, I think from 1981, that someone in her office wrote to her...Charles Moore: Oh, John Hoskyns?Henry: Yeah, yeah. And saying everything that gets quoted about her. But actually, after that memo, she was in power for another nine years. Should we be quite cautious about this idea that she was single-minded, not consensus-minded, a rude person? Should we try and be revising that image of her and saying that actually that was a more narrow part of her leadership style than is thought?Charles Moore: Well, the famous Hoskyns memo was very powerful and contained criticisms which were true. But it's also a sort of protest because he was feeling that she wasn't listening to him. And also she had certain completely maddening qualities, if you were working with her every day, which he had to get off his chest. One of them was, the less sure she was about something and the more tired she was, the more rubbish she talked. And she could, in a tight corner, particularly before she'd made a decision, burble on a great deal and criticise others for a problem which really rested with her because she was psyching herself up to do something. And that happened a lot in certain economic decisions where she was worried about their unpopularity. She might argue with Geoffrey Howe or, later, Nigel Lawson about putting up interest rates, which she was almost always against. They were quite often in favour of it. And she used this tactically and psychologically, I think without realising it. And it could be a nightmare to live with, but leaders perhaps have to be a bit of a nightmare to live with some of the time.The other thing was that because she was so jealous of her position and felt so fragile in her position as the only woman and the leader that she sort of knew people would like to get rid of, she had to — she thought, at least, that the way to deal with this is to be extremely forceful and not to be seen to give in. An upper-class man would tend to think that the graceful and sensible thing to do would be to give in and say, as a tactical thing, to say, “I'm frightfully sorry. You're completely right. I've got this completely wrong.” And she never felt she could do that. She felt she had to maintain her argument, her position at almost all times. But it didn't mean that actually she paid no attention to the criticisms or that she never altered her views because she would always claim consistency, which might not, in fact, always be there. And that was, again, a sort of technique of hers. And so she was more consensual and more pragmatic than she would admit. Her colleagues often find that hard to understand because she didn't want them to understand it. She wanted them to think that she was iron and immutable and unchangeable and, as she would put it, staunch. And actually, there was a lot more subtlety, and a sort of listening, than she or they would acknowledge.For example, trade union reform. She was always complaining about Jim Prior going so slowly, but actually she did, herself, want to go slowly. She had a great impatience which made her want to get reforms in and bring about the changes, but she also knew that she mustn't make the mistake of Ted Heath of doing one great big law all at once. She must do it bit by bit. And so she was much more pragmatic in what she did when about trade union reform than she would say she was being.Henry: You found some new material about Thatcher, particularly from when she was a young woman to do with boyfriends and letters to her sister and things that inevitably gave a much broader view of her character than we were used to from the television and the news and so forth. How did that change your view of the way she operated politically?Charles Moore: I think it confirmed something which I sensed, but it brought it out much more clearly, which is what a cunning person she was. I didn't mean that in a nasty way. Her self-description was of somebody who just knew what’s right and does it. But it wasn't like that. She did have a strong moral sense and she did have strong convictions, but she also had very strong ambitions and a sense of when to do something and when not to do something.So if you look at Margaret Roberts that she then was, wondering whom to marry, it’s the female equivalent of what nineteenth century novels used to call the choice of life for a man, which is often depicted in 19th and 18th century novels. A young man goes out to the world. What does he want to do? Does he want be a soldier or a lawyer, or whatever it might be. And how is he going to shape his life? And she was thinking a lot about that. She wanted, in the case of marriage, she definitely wanted true love, she is a romantic person, but she also wanted security, financial security, and a sense of a man she could look up to, almost certainly older, or very unlikely that anyone she would marry will be her own age, I think would be fair to say. And her most serious boyfriend was twice her age and then Dennis was 11 plus years older than she.And you can see her particularly in the year 1951 when she has three serious boyfriends, one of whom was Dennis, weighing up. One’s a farmer. Does she want to be married to a farmer? No. One is a distinguished doctor. Yes, but he is a lot of older than her. And then there’s Dennis who had had a good war and had his own business, but on the other hand was divorced. And so she’s thinking, wouldn't perhaps put it to herself like this, “How am I going to be an MP? Maybe even, how am I going to be a minister? Maybe, maybe, even how I'm I going to be Prime Minister.” Though I'm be much less sure about that, this is all very early on. But also, “How am I going to marry the right man and have children?” And these things are all going around and around in her head and influencing her decisions. “And how am I going to be able to support myself or be supported by a man. How will I have enough money?” Because she had no money from her family.And so you can see this very ardent person, but also a person who thinks very carefully before she does something, she loves the expression, the well known expression, “time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted,” and I think she was always making reconnaissance.Henry: The political scientist, Mark Garnett, has described Thatcher as banal. This is a quote from him, he says: “She was prepared to face down establishment institutions, if they opposed her. This defiance was not the product of a deep delayed plan: only interesting people engage in that style of thinking.” Is that a helpful way to think about Margaret Thatcher?Charles Moore: No, I think it’s an unhelpful way to think about it, because what he’s not acknowledging is that she's a politician. So the point about being a politician is not, do you have a brilliantly original mind? But what are you capable of doing? And she’s extremely unusual in politicians for a sustained interest, sustained over a very, very long period in her case, in office, in the content of what she was doing. And therefore, she was thinking really hard about some questions. How do we end the Cold War? How do we beat trade union leaders? How to beat inflation? With a resourceful seriousness, which might not be intellectually original, but which was in a political sense, profound. To call it banal is mistaken, because actually nobody else was like that. There was simply nobody else in the first rank who was behaving and thinking that way. So it was original. It wasn’t original in the sense that Plato’s original, but in politics it was original.Henry: Tyler Cowen has talked about the advantage of having or displaying what he calls autistic cognitive traits, so the ability, and the absorbing interest, to absorb a lot of information to categorize it, to order it, and to do this much more so than other people, along obviously with some other things. Do you think Margaret Thatcher displays those sorts of traits and did they, as I think you are sort of suggesting here, give her a political advantage and an advantage as prime minister?Charles Moore: I wouldn't use the word autistic, and I know something about autistic behavior through my own family, my own wider family. I think it's probably not the right sort of categorisation, but I think Mrs. Thatcher had astonishing powers of application. And she did have the ability to, in order to apply herself to a subject, to shut out other ones, while she was applying herself. However, she was a vulnerable human being as well. And though she wasn't the best person at reading other people’s emotions, she was, in many ways, sympathetic to people. I mean, she could be very unpleasant to people. But she was really fond of some people and grateful to them and solicitous in their difficulties and conscientious in how she ought to behave to them. She was odd in the way that all great people are odd. I don't mean all great people are odd in the same way, but all great people are odd in some way.But I don't think her mentality was quite as you described there. And I think she couldn't have survived in politics if it were because one of the things you have to do in politics is you have to have intuition about what other people are thinking. She constantly attended to what she thought voters were thinking, what was the public reaction to something or other. She wasn't obsessed with the media to anything like the degree that politicians are now, but she knew how to sniff the wind. And though she could be very brutal with colleagues, I think she did actually have powers of diplomacy which were put to very good use on the world stage, if you think of her relation with Reagan or with Gorbachev for example.Henry: How much of what we call Thatcherism was actually Lawsonism?Charles Moore: Perhaps they started out more or less together and diverged. And there was a lot in common. Before things went wrong, there was a strong alliance about that. But I think Lawsonism — I wouldn't call it an ism actually — but I think Lawson’s views about things were generally more economically based, as you might expect. There was less politics and more economics in it. And he was more thoroughly liberal in economics than she. Whereas she tended to see economics as the instrument. She did believe in free market economics, but she saw them more as the instrument of something wider. Whereas he was more interested in them in themselves, I think.Then there’s a second point, of course, which takes us on to rather different territory that Lawson, like Thatcher — because, again, a big ego — suffered from feeling that if he was doing something himself, it was bound to be good. I think all important politicians tend to fall into this category. So it was sort of self-evident to him that if he was Chancellor of the Exchequer it must be better than anybody else being Chancellor of the Exchequer. And this led him, after several successes, to a great mistake which was the whole attempt to get into the ERM and the shadowing of the Deutsche Mark in relation to that. Because it became a sort of totem about how you could manage Sterling, and it became a piece of alchemy or magic or a sort of hieratic thing, which only people of great brilliance could operate. And she, I think, had a wider view, a more common sense view about economic questions and how they weren't really like that. They didn't really depend on such calculations but on things that are, in a certain sense, simpler. Lawson was much the superior economic brain to hers, but I think he was more defective politically and didn't understand. I think there's a reason why he couldn't ever have been Conservative Party leader, though he was a very distinguished Chancellor of the Exchequer.Henry: Who are the most underrated Cabinet ministers from Margaret Thatcher's governments?Charles Moore: Well things went wrong for Geoffrey Howe. It's perhaps forgotten that he was a very good Chancellor of the Exchequer. In some ways he was a very good Foreign Secretary, but he was perhaps too indecisive and too sort of official minded. Howe was also very important in Thatcherism, though he didn't really like Mrs. Thatcher much. Richard Ryder described him as the tapestry master of Thatcherism. I think it’s a very good phrase. Howe actually preceded her in his interest in free market economics, even in the ’50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. She was interested, but he got there first very often. I think he was very important to her, in the early days, and of course, it was pretty disastrous when they finally fell out. And he was definitely a really high-class servant of the state.I think Nicholas Ridley was so bad in public presentation and politics in that general sense that people didn’t realise what a competent Minister he was and what a good brain he had. I think he was temperamentally very unsuited to modern politics in some ways, but of all the ministers in her government I always found he was one most respected by officials interestingly. He was decisive, he would take responsibility, he wouldn't duck problems, he would think through things, he was a bit wild on the political aspects, but he was more impressive than people realised.And then Norman Tebbit is an interesting one because of course, he suffered great difficulties because of the terrible injuries he suffered, he and his wife suffered in the Brighton bomb. So he may not have been such a good minister of a big department, but he did have the most formidable brain and the most tremendous capacity to express something very clearly and often amusingly. And so he sort of cut through both the people who agreed with him and people who disagreed with him. It was a very striking phenomenon, Norman Tebbit, and highly unusual in somebody who in formal terms was a middle to higher ranking rather than top ranking cabinet minister in terms of jobs. You never knew who he was and you had to watch out for him and his fierceness in debate his sort of rather spare eloquence, his toughness. All that was formidable.Henry: We live at a time when so many of the essential moments in Thatcher’s political career can be watched on YouTube, and we can hear radio clips, and we can see her letters online, and it’s possible to imagine a sort of biographical Museum of Margaret Thatcher where you can be sort of immersed in her and in her world. What sort of challenge does that present to a biographer? There’s a sort of inevitable limitation in that Disraeli only exists on paper, but Margaret Thatcher exists in all these mediums. But you as a biographer only have paper.Charles Moore: Yes, well of course I didn't only have paper in a sense that I only have paper on which to express it, but I could myself watch the clips, and indeed I saw them live frequently, because I was around at the time. I think it's very, very interesting and instructive to watch clips of Mrs. Thatcher and I'm always urging people instead of sort of theorizing about it to in television programs to show those clips because she had a tremendous gift of communication, even though sometimes the communication didn't please the recipients. She very, very clear and, in that sense, extremely good at getting a message across and that survives very well in the clip. So you can see her intent often much more clearly and strikingly than that of modern politicians and the sheer sort of emotional force she put into everything.For example, you watch when she's answering questions on the day she resigned in November 1990, answering questions in the house and then doing the no-confidence debate. It's absolutely astonishing. Particularly in the questions. When if you keep bearing in mind that she has just resigned. So she's still Prime Minister, but she's tendered her resignation that day, and there she is, not a hair out of place, incredibly tough argument, really rather witty. And as she said at one point in the debate, “I'm enjoying this.” And sort of playing it for all it's worth and engaging with people from the other side. There's a sort of almost banter she has about the nature of the gap between the rich and the poor, I think it's with Jim Sillars, the Scottish Labour MP. And a bit of a ding-dong with Simon Hughes, the Liberal MP. And it's a very good theatre, and it brings home a lot of us. I think those clips are vivid.And thank goodness for television interviews and news clips, because the House of Commons was not televised until 1989. So she'd been Prime Minister. It was on the radio all through her prime ministership, and not on the television. So we haven't got most of that on television. But we can see other things like Brian Walden interviews or news clips and so on. And they are really, really worth studying.And you're right that, obviously, I can't convey that fully in a book. I can describe it, I can quote from it, but I hope that what would happen is when people read the book, they can get more out of the clips, and when they look at the clips, they can get more out of the book.Henry: One or two general questions to close with. Who should write Tony Blair's biography?Charles Moore: I don't know who should write Tony Blair's biography, at all. And I’m certainly not volunteering myself. But I think, again, the question of fairness is important, because Blair suffered from a thing where he received absurd adulation and then absurd vilification. And, actually, the judgment on him, the historical judgment on him, should be much more nuanced and requires some detachment. And speaking only for myself, I must have written, as a journalist, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of words criticising Mr. Blair and his policies. But I think he deserves to be taken seriously as a political leader and was important, and that his fundamental message about New Labour was actually true. He's often described as a liar, but I think his fundamental message about what he was and what he was trying to do was true, and people appreciated it. And it's also true, unfortunately, that a lot of his actions were rather ill-thought-out and didn't come to much, so that's a slightly tragic element in his time. But he deserves much more serious attention than the great majority of British prime ministers.Henry: What are the most underrated political biographies?Charles Moore: I think there are quite a lot that are overrated, but it would be invidious to say which. What I most value, but this is probably somebody who's in the trade talking rather than the general reader, but what I'm looking for, I want to feel very confident that the author is fair-minded, and it also has a sort of feel for what it is he's writing about. So that he is not somehow off the point or out of his depth, or, as it were, wasn't there. I didn't mean that a biographer has to have been present when these things happen, but I mean he doesn't have a feel for how, let's say, the House of Commons really works or something like that. I like, in that sense, the biographers that are a professional. I think that man D. R. Thorpe is good, for example. I'm afraid I don't have a biography of a modern politician (and by modern I'm going back quite a long way) to hold up and say, “This is it. This is how it should be done.” But this may well be my fault. I've read by no means all of them.Henry: Charles Moore, thank you very much for your time.Charles Moore: Thank you.Don’t forget!My salon, on 1st March, TONIGHT, is Samuel Johnson: Reading for Wisdom where we will discuss pessimism, pragmatism, and the good life. The attendee list has some interesting Johnson enthusiasts — join them!My am giving a tour of the City of London tracing the route of the Great Fire and the genius of Christopher Wren on Saturday 5th March. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe