Prisons We Choose to Live Inside - Tapa dura

In this perceptive series of lectures Doris Lessing explores the strange phenomenon that although, today, we know a lot more about ourselves very little of this knowledge has been put into practical effect. Why is it that human beings continue to make the same mistakes? A fascinating combination of the 'soft sciences' - i.e. sociology, psychology, anthropology - and hard fact is used to address such topics as brainwashing group mentality and the awesome power of words. There is nothing dauntingly academic or esoteric in these discussions of events from history, recent politics and personal experience - Stalinism, the miners' strike, the Saatchi & Saatchi Tory advertising campaign and her reception in the literary world as Jane Somers - enable Lessing to write accessibly and lucidly about these concepts. This original and important work underlines the necessity to retain an independent frame of mind, to fight received opinion and to resist the general drift into apathy. The freedom of the individual is vital to democracy because it is only by permitting individuals to question and disagree that tyranny and ignorance will be defeated. It is essential that we examine 'ideas, from whatever source they come, to see how they may usefully contribute to our lives and to the societies we live in.'

Doris Lessing has been called 'the greatest living English woman novelist' (Independent). Among her outstanding works are The Grass is Singing, the five-volume Children of Violence series, The Golden Notebook, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Summer Before the Dark and the magnificent Canopus in Argus series. Her most recent novel, The Good Terrorist, was shortlisted for the 1985 Booker Prize and won the W.H. Smith Literary Award. Many of her short stories have been collected in two volumes entitled To Room Nineteen and The Temptation of Jack Orkney.