1. What is your favourite childhood book?
Skipping swiftly over a hundred books by Enid Blyton, my first real love affair was with Rider Haggard’s "She", a sort of a boys-own adventure story about a queen in Africa who discovers the secret of eternal youth. I loved everything about this book:, it's wafer thin pages, it's fake leather cover, its luscious pen and ink illustrations and its heady ideas about immortality and reincarnation. I would probably find it unreadable today. But then that is one of the pleasures of fiction; the way it offers different stories for different moments of your life.
2. What is the title of the first book you purchased for yourself?
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H Lawrence. It was such a cause celebre that I had to buy it myself because I didn’t want my local librarian to recognise me taking it out of the library. I remember I read a good chunk of it during religious instructions lessons with the paperback tucked inside a textbook. I also remember that I was not the only one!
3. Which author or authors do you most admire and why?
I really can't answer this properly as the list would be endless and even then I would forget too many names.
4. What are you reading at the moment?
A Woman in Berlin. This extraordinary book is actually an anonymous diary written by a German woman in her mid thirties woman who was living in Berlin at the end of the second world war when the Soviet army invaded the city. She writes with breathless honesty about the horrors of war and occupation: rape, starvation and the humiliations of defeat. It is one of the most shocking, but also most illuminating and somehow reassuring stories about women's ability to survive the worst that life can throw at them: as inspiring as it is terrifying.
5. Which classic book have you always meant to read and know you'll never round to it?
A boring answer I'm afraid. In fact it's almost a cliché. The book is Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past". I've already tried and failed to read it twice. I just don't think life is long enough to give it a third go.
6. If you had to take one book to a desert island, what would you choose and why?
See the previous answer. Presumably on a desert island I would eventually have to read the damn thing.
7. If you could recommend a book to someone who said they hated reading, what would you choose?
Anything by Roald Dahl. For his exuberance, narrative invention and naughtiness.
8. Was it a book or a person that inspired you to write?
I honestly can't answer this. For many years as a teenager I was obsessed by history and historical novels. So much so that at the age of 15 I wrote a (mercifully) short, excruciatingly bad book about Elizabeth 1st ,imprisoned as a princess in the Tower of London. It filled one school exercise book and most of the nouns in it were preceded by at least three adjectives. Enough said I think.
9. If you weren't an author, what would your alternative career be and why?
If I had been born with a voice I would have sold my soul to be a back up singer to Bob Dylan or Bob Marley.
10. Which book character's life would you most like to have lived?
I think it would have to Angelique. At the same time as I was writing about Elisabeth 1st, I was also reading a technicolourful set of novels about a indefatigable French beauty who lived during the reign of Louis X1V and whose adventures took her from the court of the Sun King, through the low life of Paris and the slave markets of Constantinople, to the new world of America. I worked out later that by the end of last book she must have been 60 years old, but still ravishingly beautiful and regularly ravished. Forget Jane Austin’s polite, ironic heroines. Who could possibly compete with Angelique?
