Looking back, almost half a century into being a writer and editor -- Diana Athill

"Days short of her 90th birthday - the phone keeps ringing, with friends organising lunches to celebrate - she could not seem further from any kind of blurring. There is something absolutely present about her. Her voice is poised between precise pre-war tones and grammar and an unforced modernity - a tension that exists in her work, too. She began writing at 43, with short stories, before discovering that she was a memoirist, and that even dressing up memoir as fiction was not for her. Her work is always described as honest (generally preceded by words like "painful", "terrible", "deplorable", "breathtaking"). Pain, fear and shame, happiness and unhappiness are faced up to and anatomised- not dismissed, but not allowed to rule, either. She calls it getting things right.

She is helped by a vivid memory. Her parents were not particularly happy (her mother had an affair and her father, a colonel in the British Army, was often away), but Yesterday Morning, Athill's account of growing up on her grandmother's Georgian estate in Norfolk, written when she was 85, is full of happiness. She and her siblings and cousins had the run of the grounds, eating moorhen's eggs, feeding pigs, damming streams. "Everything important in my life seemed to be a property of that place: the house and the gardens, the fields, woods and waters belonging to it. Beauty belonged to it, and the underlying fierceness which must be accepted with beauty . . . safety belonged to it, and so did my knowledge of good and evil, and my wobbly preference for good." Indoors, every teatime, their grandmother read to them: Ivanhoe, The Jungle Book, Jackanapes"

Read the whole thing here

And oh, you may also want to take this test. And see how close you come to one of the world's most irascible (whenever he opens his mouth) writers. I scored 5 and was told -- "You clearly need to read more books by men."

I was like, WTF. Isn't that a "sexist" bit of advice?