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From: "Peter McCrae" <>
Subject: [WORLD-OBITS] LAMBERT: Angela Maria Lambert sep,2007
Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2007 16:29:06 +0100


Angela Lambert
Last Updated: 2:28am BST 27/09/2007
The Telegraph.co.uk



Angela Lambert, who died yesterday aged 67, was a journalist, historian and
novelist.

She published seven novels investigating how lives were shaped by history,
accident, class and love. Among them was A Rather English Marriage (1992),
which was turned by Andrew Davies into an acclaimed television drama
starring Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney.

The book tells the story of two widowers in Tunbridge Wells, a retired
milkman (Roy, played in the television programme by Courtenay) and a former
businessman and squadron leader (Reggie, the part taken by Finney).

Each man, in his own different way, finds his life impoverished by the death
of his wife. Roy moves into Reggie's house, and their relationship becomes
the focus for an examination of the class system and the meaning of
marriage.

Angela Lambert said that in creating Roy and Reggie she drew on the
personality of her own father.

The daughter of a civil servant, Angela Maria Lambert was born on April 14
1940, and regarded her date of birth as "a piece of extraordinary good luck,
since it meant that I was one of the first wave of women to benefit from the
Pill, feminism and equal (if still far from perfect) opportunities".

She was sent to boarding school, an experience which left her with the
memory of being "dumped by unfeeling parents".

>From childhood, however, she knew the course she wished to take. "Since the
age of 12," she recalled, "I always knew I was a writer. "

She read PPE at St Hilda's College, Oxford, then found employment as a
cleaner for the Earl and Countess of Listowel.

In 1962 she married Martin Lambert, but the union ended five years later
when he left her with two young children to support.

Angela Lambert embarked on a career in journalism, in 1962 becoming an
assistant editor on the magazine Modern Woman, which - despite its title -
sacked her when she told them she was pregnant.

She then spent three years, from 1964 to 1967, as private secretary to Lord
Longford.

Later she decided to return to the media. From 1972 to 1976 she was a
reporter with ITN before moving to London Weekend Television (1976-77) and
Thames Television (1977-88).

In 1988 she joined the newly-launched Independent, remaining there until
1995. She also worked for The Sunday Telegraph and Daily Mail and broadcast
on the radio.

Angela Lambert began writing books after being diagnosed with portal
hypertension in 1979. Her first two works - Unquiet Souls: The Indian Summer
of the British Aristocracy (1984) and 1939, The Last Season of Peace
(1989) - were social history about Britain in the periods preceding the two
world wars.

The first concerned "the Souls", the upper-class intellectual club that had
its heyday between the 1880s and 1914; the latter was a study of the
debutantes who came out in the last season before the outbreak of war.

She told one interviewer: "It is difficult for anyone who is not British to
comprehend the degree to which snobbery, accent and the class system
dominate this society. As a socialist and something of a republican, I
deplore it; as a novelist and an observer of human behaviours, I am
fascinated by it.

"The nuances of class, and the arrogance or subservience it generates, are a
major influence upon people's behaviour towards one another in this country.
Both my two books of social history and my novels. explore this English
trait."

Apart from A Rather English Marriage, Angela Lambert's novels included Love
Among the Single Classes (1989) and No Talking After Lights (1990), about
the life and loves of a character called Constance.

They were followed by The Constant Mistress (1994); Kiss and Kin (1997);
Golden Lads and Girls (1999); and The Property of Rain (2001).

Since 1986 Angela Lambert had lived with the television director Tony Price.
He survives her with the son and daughter of her marriage to Martin Lambert,
and a daughter from her relationship with the Hungarian-born writer Stephen
Vizinczey, the author of In Praise of Older Women.





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