About Lynne

My first job after leaving school in 1973. In those days a “year out” usually meant character-building backpacking across Rajasthan, but I chose a stuffy academic library in Bloomsbury where I felt stupid (and overheated) all the time. Occasionally I have a reason to use this library and come across books still sporting the labels on their spines that my 18-year-old self wrote in my best handwriting and stuck on half a century ago…

After graduating from UCL, I had a year to fill before returning for a PHD, and answered an advertisement on the back page of The Listener for a secretarial job. The interview led to something else, when I was offered a six-month contract at Radio Times, sub-editing on the programme pages in a smoke-filled office in Marylebone High Street.

In those days a sub-editor’s equipment included a glue-pen, a box of pins (for attaching galleys together), and a metal em-rule. One of my colleagues on the TV listings pages wore pastry cuffs to protect the long sleeves of her blouses. I took to this inky business at once, and the appeal of solitary study started to pall.

After six months at the Radio Times, I had just applied for a DES grant for my PhD when this job came up on the Times Higher Education Supplement. I interviewed for it and got it, but was confused about what to do, as I was due back at university in a few months. I went to see Karl Miller, who would have been my PhD supervisor at UCL, assuming he would urge me to take the academic path, but he advised me that if I wanted a career in literary journalism (which is what he’d had himself, of course), this was a great, and actually quite rare, opportunity. So I went for it.

The name of the paper is nowadays THE, which I suppose takes less time to say, but probably needs supplementary explanation. But I suppose it couldn’t go on the way it was. Arthur Miller told me when I interviewed him for the THES that a paper with a name like “The Times Higher Education Supplement” would sink like a stone in the US.

I have to admit that the nitty-gritty of higher education policy never interested me at all, but the books pages covered a huge range of subjects, so I learned a lot. Also, publishers misguidedly sent us all sorts of books unsuitable for academic review that I could sit and read at my desk, or just take home. I still come across books in my library with the review slip inside from Cambridge University Press in 1983, or whatever. Meanwhile I started writing on arts/books subjects for the TES and The Times. It really was very comfortable. I stayed eight years.

In 1986, Derwent May left The Listener for the Sunday Telegraph and there was a bit of a bunfight among young literary types for his job. I’m not sure why I won: perhaps because I loved The Listener and had read it for years.

The offices were in the same building as Radio Times (35 Marylebone High Street – or MHS in BBC parlance), so in a way it was like going home. While I was there, we moved from old print technology to photo-composition, but that’s where we stalled. We never got as far as “new technology”. Sadly, the end was already in sight for The Listener when I left in 1990. It finally closed in 1991.