The inner facts of JG Ballard

John Baxter’s new biography of JG Ballard, The Inner Man, accuses the late novelist of widespread sloppiness with facts, including getting both his parents’ birth dates wrong in his memoir Miracles of Life. Baxter also states that: “Even after Thatcher was eased out of office in 1990, public life didn’t lack women with her quality of schoolmarmish aggression…” and lists, as evidence, Barbara Woodhouse, Mary Whitehouse, Esther Rantzen, and Germaine Greer.

Greer was indeed going strong then. But Barbara Woodhouse had been dead two years by 1990; Mary Whitehouse was a spent force after a spinal injury in 1988; Esther Rantzen’s campaigning TV show That’s Life was on its last legs, and she was on to heartwarming tales of ordinary heroism in Hearts of Gold.

This article appeared in the Diary in the October 2011 issue of Prospect