Somewhere at the back of a cupboard in my house is the pair of tiny white lace shorts Shirley Conran gave me when I interviewed her in 2012. I’ve never worn them; although she insisted they were just the thing for bed, I worried they would frighten the horses even there. Yet every time I think of throwing them out, I’m unable to do it.
Conran, one of the funniest, sharpest people you could ever meet, bought those shorts to mark the publication of a new edition of Lace, her bestselling bonkbuster of 1982, and because of this I regard them as an important cultural artefact. One day, I may give them, along with my signed copy of Lace, to the Bodleian Library in Oxford: an acquisition that will illustrate to future generations both her lack of pretension, and the way in which women’s writing and reading was still belittled, even at the back end of the 20th century.
