Stop the Clocks by Joan Bakewell review – a life challenging double standards

These reflections on getting older are poignant, and the broadcaster’s experience retains the power to shock, but too many of her views seem pickled in aspic

Joan Bakewell, reflecting from old age on the shifting moral certainties of our time; well, who wouldn’t want to read that? I certainly did. The broadcaster, peer and all-round pioneering feminist pillar of the liberal establishment has lived an unusually interesting life, never far from the public square. Now 82, she should have been perfectly placed to reflect on “how the world has changed” over her lifetime, as the blurb has it, and what her generation leaves to the next. But there is a terrible danger in beginning a book with sky-high expectations, and Stop The Clocks illustrates it perfectly.

The book opens with Bakewell tucked away in a rural writer’s retreat, with little ostensibly to do but walk to the river and back, reflecting on life. It reads less like an autobiography – she has already done one of those – than a writer’s journal, a fragmentary collection of anecdotes many of which are individually very engaging. Yet to suggest they add up to some greater truth is frankly pushing it.

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