The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age. James Naughtie

a hard time by women, and that they deserved less bashing: ‘I have nothing in common with feminists because of their inflexibility. They never seem to think that one might like men, or enjoy them.’ She came to believe that what she called ‘the rubbishing of men’ had become part of contemporary culture and she was having none of it.

      Her refusal ever to be dragooned into a cause, or stuck in a rut, meant that she has never felt pressured to say ‘the right thing’. She was asked by Time magazine about Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and said she would never go back because he was ‘a monstrous little terror … who had created a caste, a layer of people just like himself who are corrupt and crooked’. And then, for good measure, explaining how she believed the country had been ruined, she said: ‘Under the whites it was an extremely efficient country. It could grow absolutely everything. We had railways and post offices and roads and water that worked. You can’t just put that back overnight.’

      So the young woman whose first writing had revealed her horror was willing to reflect on the experience in a way that few others, radicalized in colonial Africa, would find it easy to do. Lessing’s mark has always been a refusal to follow a predictable line of argument, and not to care very much what others are making of it.

      Just as she rejected the politics that first attracted her in forties Africa, where she thought everything hopeless under a status quo that couldn’t last, so she would not go down the road with some of those who used The Golden Notebook as an inspiration, as she once put it to the New York Times in a way that was semi-religious: ‘They want me to bear witness,’ she said. ‘What they would really like me to say is “Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle towards the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.” Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I’ve come with great regret to this conclusion.’

      Although her antennae have retained a sensitive feeling for injustice – she has written of the uphill struggle of women in Pakistan and Afghanistan, for example – she preferred, after the sixties, to shift her focus to a place that was mystical rather than part of the world. In The Golden Notebook, Anna, in the course of trying to sort herself out, expresses interest in mysticism, and it was a clue to the path that Lessing herself would follow. She became interested in the mystic Islamic practice of Sufism. More than 1,000 years ago it was practised as a way of counteracting what was seen even then – though not in these words – as a preoccupation with the material world, the here and now. So many of Lessing’s themes, in books set in different places, in different times, have concerned a means of escape (or self-realization) that it was, in retrospect, quite a natural thing, although surprising at the time. And few of those who were moved and inspired by The Golden Notebook would have expected its author, within ten years, to turn her attention to science fiction. That is what she did.

      For twenty years she was writing books which touched on mystical ways of thinking, and in the middle of that period she published a five-book sequence – Canopus in Argos: Archives – set in a fictional galactic empire. In it she explored the idea which so attracted her: that individuals can find satisfaction and succour in working for a universal rather an individual good.

      Lessing’s place in the novelists’ hall of fame – she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 – came about in part because of that ability to inhabit different fictional worlds with a surefootedness that seemed unique. She was capable of travelling back from the galaxy of Canopus in 1985, for example, to write The Good Terrorist, which explored the ambiguities of a middle-class woman, converted to terrorism. It was a book ahead of its time, dealing with subjects that would become near-obsessions of writers of fiction two decades later. That easy breadth, the ability to move from the mystical to the horribly rational, has always been her special power: in her eighties she was writing novels about a love of cats, in The Old Age of El Magnifico, and about the grown-up years of Ben, the social misfit, whom she had introduced in a book twenty years before.

      Running through it all has been a commitment to the business of literature that has given Lessing a special status among other writers. She began to write in the forties, published first in the fifties, and has been moving and startling her readers ever since. It’s a trade she cares about. In the 1980s she wrote two books under a pseudonym – Jane Somers – to show how difficult it is to be published, and for unknown writers to start to do what she had done. They not only had difficulty being published, but didn’t sell well.

      It’s maybe the mark of Doris Lessing that where other writers might have been embarrassed or irritated by that, she was pleased. In her nineties, after a lifetime’s work at it, she is still determined to resist group thinking, being drawn along. She remains her own woman, and has made her point.

Alan Sainsbury

      When Alan Sainsbury walked into one of the first self-service shops opened by his family in Croydon, south London, at the start of the 1950s, a shopper, on being told who he was, threw a new wire basket at him in a fury. Not everyone wanted cheese wrapped up instead of being cut by a wire, nor their vegetables pre-packed. But Sainsbury knew that many did and that soon they would be the majority.

      He’d been convinced in the United States. In 1949 he went there to look at the experience of shoppers in the lengthening chains of stores that were criss-crossing the country. Even before the war, 40 per cent of American shopping was self-service, the supermarkets having mushroomed through the Depression, giving people value for money and cutting out the frills, except for those sturdy brown paper bags that many of them are still reluctant to throw away. Sainsbury – ‘Mr Alan’ to the company board, which was still dominated by the family – argued that it was the future in Britain. There was scepticism. But he was given a chance to try.

      Sainsbury’s had been started in 1869 as a dairy in Drury Lane in central London and had built up a big business with shops in many parts of the country. In the twenties it expanded into general groceries (and watched with interest when another company set up shop in 1929: Tesco). So the network existed. What hadn’t happened in Britain was the change to self-service. Customers still expected personal service from a person in a white coat, if it was a grocer’s, and perhaps a conversation about the apples, or an investigation into the age of a cheese.

      Who owned the shop was less important. After all, about a quarter of shopping in the years immediately before the war was done in co-operatives, and another quarter in shops that were part of a chain. Small, independent retailers were cherished on every high street, but they were not the whole story. The big retailers were spreading their influence, and Sainsbury came back from America convinced that it was time for revolution: self-service shopping would take off. At that early shop in Croydon he was proved right. Despite having had to dodge the flying wire basket, he saw a shop that attracted customers like bees to a honeypot. Mr Alan had got it right, and he became the architect of the changing high street, and the retail parks that were still some way off but would change the landscape. He was the father of the British supermarket.

      Sainsbury started serving as an apprentice in the family store in Bournemouth, at the Boscombe branch, keeping his name a secret. He did time in the dairy department, working for Uncle Arthur and Uncle Alfred, when it was still the rule that only members of the family could order the eggs and milk. Having known the founders – he was born in 1902, only thirty-three years after the first shop opened – he had an attachment to the firm as a family concern but made a connection between that inheritance and what would now be called social responsibility. He’d worked in a charity mission in the East End of London and in the thirties his politics were not conventional for a rising figure in a rich business family. He’d thought of committing himself to some kind of social work but eventually did the inevitable, saying his mother told him it would break his father’s heart if he didn’t.

      He campaigned for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, making common cause with Conservatives and Communists in the process, and became a committed member of the Liberal Party (he would join Labour in 1945 and be a founding member of the SDP in the eighties). During the Second World War he represented the grocers to the Ministry