Main content

There's No Story There

New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen profiles Inez Holden, novelist and journalist who reported on the Nuremberg Trials and was a friend of George Orwell, HG Wells and Stevie Smith.

The dangerous world of an explosives factory is the setting of Inez Holden’s 1944 novel There’s No Story There. A bohemian figure who went on to write film scripts for J Arthur Rank, to report on the Nuremberg Trials, and produce articles published in Cyril Connolly's magazine Horizon - Holden campaigned for workers’ rights and was close friend of George Orwell, and though she published ten books in her lifetime, she fell out of fashion - until now. New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen re-reads her writing and finds a refreshingly modern mind.

Lisa Mullen is the author of Mid-Century Gothic: The Uncanny Objects of Modernity in British Literature and Culture after the Second World War. She teaches at the University of Cambridge and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which selects ten academics each year to turn their research into radio.
You can hear Lisa writing on George Orwell and the contribution of his wife in a Radio 3 Essay called Who Wrote Animal Farm? /programmes/m000413q
She has presented short features about Mary Wollstonecraft as a single mother /programmes/m00061ly
On the blackthorn in Sloe Time /programmes/m000n6bx
She has contributed to Free Thinking discussions about Contagion and Viruses /programmes/m000gbq6 and Weimar and the Subversion of Cabaret /programmes/m000b7r7
She has presented episodes of Free Thinking looking at eco-criticism /programmes/m000rw8t and Panto and magic /programmes/m000q376

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Available now

14 minutes

Last on

Fri 27 Oct 2023 22:45

More episodes

Next

You are at the last episode

See all episodes from The Essay

Broadcasts

  • Fri 19 Mar 2021 22:45
  • Fri 27 Oct 2023 22:45

Featured in...

Death in Trieste

Death in Trieste

A 1760s murder still informs ideas about aesthetics, a certain sort of sex, and death.

Watch: My Deaf World

Watch: My Deaf World

Five compelling experiences of what it is like to be deaf in 21st-century Britain.

The Book that Changed Me

Five figures from the arts and science introduce books that changed their lives and work.

Download The Essay

Download The Essay

Download all the episodes from the series and listen at your leisure.

Podcast