Rediscovering the lost world of Marghanita Laski
A radio great lives on thanks to one publisher’s vision.
Marghanita Laski was a formidable public intellectual known to millions of radio listeners back in the 1950s thanks to her appearances on The Brains Trust, a forerunner to Any Questions? but rather more highbrow.
Lately I’ve become acquainted with Laski via her novels, which are remarkable and brilliant, and I’m frustrated not to be able to find any audio of her.
I’m not sure there are any equivalent figures occupying the current media landscape, an impression reinforced by the deeper understanding I gained of Laski at a festival I attended this weekend run by the Bath-based publisher Persephone Books.
Persephone’s rediscovery of (mainly female) “lost” writers of the mid-20th century has been one of publishing’s biggest success stories of recent years, the venture’s spirit of enterprise helping to restore the likes of Laski and Dorothy Whipple to a position more truly reflective of their calibre.
Laski’s 1949 novel Little Boy Lost - the story of a father’s search for his young son in immediate postwar France - was the focus of one Persephone event I went to, and all of us who’d read it agreed on its author’s psychological acuity and on the way her handling of the moral choices that lay at the heart of the story gave it an almost thriller-like quality.
Add these gifts to Laski’s love of language - alongside her books and her radio work she contributed tens of thousands of definitions to the Oxford English Dictionary - and it’s easy to see why she would have cut through to Brains Trust listeners, a rare female presence on a programme dominated by men.
In an introduction to the Persephone edition of Laski’s terrifying novel The Victorian Chaise Longue - I strongly recommend it - PD James writes that she can well remember Laski on The Brains Trust and “listening to that immediately recognisable, slightly arrogant, upper-class voice”.
Laski, James continued, “was a formidable and sometimes intimidating woman who never compromised her own beliefs or standards. Undoubtedly she could have become a television celebrity but she set her face against the cult of personality”.
Laski - born 1915, died 1988 - was truly a woman of her time, and few people now will remember her. One friend of mine does - he’s in his nineties - and he was recently grumbling to me about the quality of the contributions he’d heard on a prominent Radio 4 discussion programme, nostalgically reflecting that “it’s not exactly CEM Joad or Bertrand Russell, is it”, referencing a couple of Brains Trust stalwarts.
He wasn’t being entirely serious, but I myself frowned a bit when on a recent edition of The Moral Maze not one but two contributors used the word “reticent” when they meant “reluctant” - why are people suddenly so reluctant to use the word reluctant? - which is not a mistake one imagines Marghanita Laski would ever have made.
The radio world she occupied has gone for ever, and given the patrician tone of The Brains Trust - just the programme’s title would now be inconceivable - that is not to be regretted.
But that Laski can still command our attention today is, to me, indisputable, and we largely have Persephone Books to thank for that.
There is also this 2023 edition of Radio 3’s Free Thinking in which Laski and the writer Betty Miller are discussed by Matthew Sweet and guests.
... another name for my reading list...thank you