Margaret Forster wrote one of the defining novels of the 1960s, Georgy Girl, a best-seller that which was made into a hit and also inspired the eponymous earworm from The Seekers.

Forster, who died in 2016, was also a literary biographer and memoirist. Her novels, some 25 of them, have a strong feminist and socialist core and concentrate on women’s lives, and she was a long-term critic for the Evening Standard and a regular broadcaster. When Forster appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1994 her music choices were ecumenical; she included the Beatles (her husband Hunter Davies was the band’s biographer) as well as Gustav Holst and a Chas and Dave knees-up paean to Tottenham Hotspur (her husband’s favourite football team).