In 1963 The Observer offered Katharine Whitehorn, the chance to write a weekly column on whatever she liked – perhaps the first time in British journalism a woman had been given such an opportunity.

In this podcast, she talks to the Yorkshire Post's Digital Editor David Behrens about her timeless cookery tome Cooking in a Bedsit, and recalls marriage, widowhood and 40 years in Fleet Street with the same honesty and humour that marks her out as a unique and intelligent journalistic voice.
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Katharine Whitehorn grew up in Mill Hill and studied at Cambridge. She worked for the Observer from 1960 to 1996 with stints at Picture Post and the Spectator among others. She is currently Saga magazine's resident agony aunt.

Writing on her husband's choice of neckwear: "Did you buy that tie?" "Of course I did - how do you think I got it?" "I assumed it had been given away free with something."

Katharine Whitehorn pioneered the first of the personal columns. She told us how it really was. She was funny - and smart. For nearly 40 years the Observer's star columnist, she is also famous for Cooking in a Bedsitter.

Much loved for her frankness and honesty, her autobiography is about family, studying at Roedean, work on Fleet Street and about her long marriage to the recently deceased crime writer Gavin Lyall.

"Marriage is the water in which you swim, the land you live in . . . once a widow you have to learn to live in another country in which you are an unwelcome refugee."

Selective Memory by Katherine Whitehorn, is published in paperback by Virago at £8.99. ISBN: 9781844082407.