“Oh, Christ!” was Doris Lessing’s response when she found out she’d won the Nobel Prize while she was out shopping. It was also the response when she spent the night with the sado-mashocistic theatre critic Kenneth Tynan.
“We knew each other off and on for years, and there was never a spark of sexual feeling between us,” she said in an interview. “But one time I had to stay the night with him because it was late. I wasn’t expecting anything but a nice chat. I went to get ready for bed and when I came back all these whips had appeared. What was really strange was that he never said anything like, ‘Oh, Doris, would you like a little whipping?’ And I never said, ‘Ken, what are all these whips for?’ So we chatted away about politics, went to sleep, then, in the morning, in comes his secretary to tidy away the whips. It was so funny.”
