This is a selection of Doris Lessing's essays and reviews on literature,politics and autobiography from the late 1950s to the 1970s, plus interviews with the author herself. It includes pieces on Kurt Vonnegut,Olive Schreiner, Malcolm X and Sufism and an autobiographical piece, "Impertinent Daughters".

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Doris Lessing made several visits to her homeland, Zimbabwe, a country from which she had been banned for twenty-five years for her opposition to the government of what was then white Southern Rhodesia. Mingling memory and reportage in vivid detail, Doris Lessing pays passionate and profound testament to an extraordinary country, its landscape, people and unquenchable spirit. 'African Laughter' is both a shrewd and perceptive protrait of a modern African state emerging from its bloody and terrible colonial history, and a candid and moving insight into the mind of one of this century's finest writers.

`The Sentimental Agents ...' is set in the declining Volyen Empire as the empires of Sirius and Shammat compete to overwhelm it with rhetoric and false sentiment. The Canopean Empire deploys covert agents to help the Volyens resist. But one of these agents, Incent, succumbs to `Undulant Rhetoric', and Agent Klorathy must go to Volyen to help him see through the empty words that have beguiled him.

Once more employing alien races to identify human failings, Lessing uses social and political satire to show how we misuse speech (and speeches) and delude ourselves with self-aggrandizing notions about the primacy of emotion. Her renowned insight into human behaviour goes hand in hand here with a vein of humour that sees her writing in the tradition of Voltaire and Swift.

The story of the final days of our planet is told through the reports of Johor, an emissary sent from Canopus. Earth, now named Shikasta (the Stricken) by the kindly, paternalistic Canopeans who colonised it many centuries ago, is under the influence of the evil empire of Puttiora. War, famine, disease and environmental disasters ravage the planet. To Johor, mankind is a `totally crazed species', racing towards annihilation: his orders to save humanity set him what seems to be an impossible task.

The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five is the second volume in Doris Lessing's celebrated space fiction series, 'Canopus in Argos: Archives'.The Marriagesis set in the indeterminate lands of the Zones, Strange realms which encircle the Earth. Zone Three, a peaceful, contented, matriarchalparadise, is ruled by the gentle Queen Al-Ith; the neighbouring Zone four is land given to war and chaos, controlled by brutal warrior-king, Ben-Ata. Their marriage, a melding of the extreme male and female principles, threatens to destabilise the entire galactic empire.

In this interlinked quintet of novels, she creates a new, extraordinary cosmos where the fate of the Earth is influenced by the rivalries and interactions of three powerful galactic empires, Canopus, Sirius and their enemy, Puttiora blending myth, fable and allegory, Doris Lessing's astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the history of own world from its earliest beginnings to an inevitable, tragic self-destruction. The Sirian Experiments chronicles the origins of our planet, the three galactic empires fight for control of the human race. The novel charts the gradual moral awakening of its narrator, charts the charts the gradual moral awakening of its narrator, a 'dry, dutiful, efficient' female Sirian administrator. Witnessing the wanton colonisation of land and people, begins to question her involvement in such insidious experimentation, her faith in the possibility os human progress itself growing weaker every day.