What Book... 

. . . are you reading now?

I usually have two books on the go and right now they include Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers, a perfect light read but a deep and stirring novel about a spinster in the 1950s – trapped by her bad-tempered, widowed mother – eventually tasting the joy and hope that falling in love brings.

The writing is remarkable and the characters so real they live with you after you close the book.

My other book is She Speaks! by Dame Harriet Walter. One

of our most celebrated Shakespearean actors, she has had a lifetime to consider the Bard’s female characters.

In excellent poems, she gives Juliet’s Nurse, Macbeth’s witches, Desdemona, Gertrude and the rest not just a voice, but often the motivation, or explanation, or opinion, that Shakespeare failed to allow them.

. . . would you take to a desert island?

Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads. It’s billed, like so many history books, as changing the way we see history. But for once it’s true.

I had, like most of my generation, been fed an idea that being European, particularly British, was better, and always had been. Frankopan made me realise that for centuries Britain was a small island not even worth invading.

The centre of the world was not London or Paris, but rather Athens, Alexandria, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Samarkand, Xi’an. And the great silk roads carried not just goods, but ideas of science, religion and philosophy.

. . . first gave you the reading bug?

I remember my mother coming into the study to find my brother and me, sitting on Dad’s lap,

all three of us in tears. He was reading Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose out loud.

‘Why don’t you stop reading if it makes you all so miserable?’ she said. ‘But it’s wonderful,’ we replied. And the first book I read by myself was also a weepie and also by Paul Gallico: It was Jennie, about a cat.

. . . left you cold?

The Satanic verses. I tried to read this before the fatwa on Salman Rushdie and failed as I found it tedious, and again afterwards in a bid to understand it. But I still found it dense and impenetrable. Odd. I loved Midnight’s Children.