Random Commentary is a short volume which consists of extracts from the diaries and notebooks of our bestselling writer, Dorothy Whipple. It was compiled by her in 1965, in Blackburn, to which she had returned a few years before, after her husband’s death, and was published in early 1966, a few months before she died. So in some respects this is a tribute to a novelist’s life but because she chose the extracts (from 1925-45) herself it is, naturally – this is after all Dorothy Whipple – modest and self-deprecating but always extremely honest.