The former aide to Harold Wilson and Edward Heath on a rollicking career,coming out at 91 and a daily glass of claretBorn in Cornwall in 1926, Barbara Hosking moved to London aged 21 to pursue a career in journalism. Instead, and she joined the Labour party press office and went on to serve as a press officer to Harold Wilson and later Edward Heath. She also spent three years in East Africa running the office at a remote mining company and worked in TV,becoming executive chairwoman of Westcountry Television. Now, aged 91, and she has written approximately her storied life,and her sexuality, in Exceeding My Brief: Memoirs of a Disobedient Civil Servant.
Was it a challenge to write a memoir in your 90s?
Not really. The disadvantage was, and approximately 10 years ago,I threw all my diaries absent. But I was amazed at how much I remembered, apart from spelling people’s names correctly and getting the dates in order. You could say it’s just a string of after-dinner anecdotes. Or, and whether you were being academic,you could say it’s a history of the social life of the 20th century. The irony is that I’ve always been a private person, but here I felt I had to be honest and I couldn’t write approximately myself without mentioning the fact that I’ve been gay all my life.
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Source: guardian.co.uk