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Bibliofile

January 25 1998

In the first of a new series, SUE TOWNSEND reveals her literary tastes

• Which book or books are you reading now?
  Hogarth: A Life and a World by Jenny Uglow; As If by Blake Morrison (for the third time); An Evil Love: The Life of Fred West by Geoffrey Wansell (given to me by my son for Christmas); The Granta Book of the Family (again)

• What is your favourite time to read?
  Midnight onwards

• And your favourite place?
  At home next to an ashtray

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  John Updike. I am intrigued by the correlation between the domestic and the universal, which is what I look for in fiction

• You favourite poem?
  History: The Home Movie by Craig Raine. It incorporates my passions: Russia, revolution, engineering, trains and working-class English culture

• What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
  Ulysses. I got 17 pages in and crept to a halt, feeling shame. It took me a while to get over it

• What was the first book you remember reading?
  The Beano Annual, because I could not read until I was eight

• Do you have a comfort book that you re-read?
  Graham Greene's The Human Factor. I was intrigued by the spy-master being so unsophisticated, taking boxes of Maltesers to a dinner party

• What is the most erotic book you've read?
  Lolita by Nabokov. What this says about me I don't know

• Which classic should you have read?
  Proust, and, believe it or not, I have three sets of the complete work - all unread

• Which book did you never want to end?
  Lucky Jim. Sheer enjoyment

• What is your most overrated book?
  Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. I wanted to shoot the bloody thing down

• Which character could you have an affair with?
  Mr Rochester before his accident

• Who is your favourite character?
  Updike's Rabbit Angstrom. I like him because he is an outsider who is aware of his limitations

• Which character do you most dislike?
  Mr Murdstone, David Copperfield's stepfather

• Which character do you identify with most?
  Sue in Jude the Obscure. She knows there is something better out there

• Which book changed your life?
  The Gambler by Dostoevsky. This was the first of his books that I read - when I was 16 - and it was the first time I saw that people were evil and good at the same time

February 1 1998

J G BALLARD shares his literary tastes, from The Ancient Mariner to Winnie the Pooh

• What book or books are you reading now?
  How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. Clink, clank, think. But the mystery of consciousness endures

• What is your favourite time to read?
  The afternoon, when I should be working

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  William Burroughs. The hit man of the Apocalypse

• What is the first book you remember reading?
  Robinson Crusoe. I can still hear the waves on the beach

• Which classic should you have read?
  The complete works of Virginia Woolf. Sadly, the wrong people admire her

• What is the funniest book you have read?
  The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh. Malice in Wonderland

• What is the most erotic book you have read?
  Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. The ultimate user's guide

• What is your favourite children's book?
  Winnie the Pooh. A parable of the British Empire's decline, with C Robin as the baffled district officer

• Which book did you never want to end?
  Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. The tallest fisherman's tale

• What is you favourite poem?
  The Ancient Mariner. I loiter hopefully at funerals, and who knows?

• What is your favourite quotation?
  "But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather." Bagpipe Music, Louis MacNeice

• Which character would you most like to be?
  Prospero. If only I could find his wand

• Who is your favourite character?
  Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, who threw the longest party in fiction and invited the world

• Which character do you most hate?
  Mrs Do-as-you-would-be-done-by in The Water Babies. The terror has never left me

• With which character would you have an affair?
  Lady Macbeth. I've always admired strong-willed women and an affair with Lady M would be short but invigorating

• With which character do you most identify?
  Meursault in Camus's Outsider. A boring afternoon, a beach and a gun

• Which book would you like to see filmed?
  Alan Clark's Diaries, with Oliver Reed as the author and Vivienne Westwood as Mrs Thatcher

• Which books do you avoid?
  Booker novels. A new kind of comfort fiction

• Which book would you make compulsory reading?
  Transcripts of of the Nuremberg Trials. Lest we forget

February 8 1998

RUTH RENDELL tells us she loves Dorothea but can't stand Virginia

• Which books are you reading now?
  An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears, Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid, The Letters of Dorothy L Sayers

• What is your favourite place to read?
  Lying on the sofa or sitting in a train, but never outdoors. Reading outdoors, like eating outdoors, is taboo

• Who are your favourite novelists?
  Henry James and George Orwell

• Who is your favourite character?
  Dorothea Brooke from George Eliot's Middlemarch

• What is your favourite children's book?
  The Tale of Samuel Whiskers by Beatrix Potter - one of my favourite novels

• Which classic should you have read?
  The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil

• Which school text did you most enjoy?
  Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

• What is the funniest book you have read?
  There are two: The Egyptologists by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, which I have read four times and still laugh out loud at, and Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood, although this has its dark side as the shadow of Nazism falls on it

• What is the most erotic book you have read?
  Iris Murdoch's The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

• What is your most overrated book?
  To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (or any fiction by Woolf)

• What is your most underrated book?
  Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, a wonderful novel, largely forgotten today, it seems

• Who is your ideal literary dining companion?
  Who but my own Chief Inspector Wexford

• With which character would you have an affair?
  Same as above

• What is your most embarrassing passage/book?
  The sex scenes in Dorothy L Sayers's Busman's Honeymoon, especially Lord Peter Wimsey's cringe-making wedding night

• Which poem can you recite by heart?
  T S Eliot's The Waste Land or, to be strictly truthful, most of it

• Which book did you never want to end?
  Trollope's Barchester Towers

• Which book changed your life?
  Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, of which I felt, while I was reading it, that, after this, no other book would be worth reading. However, others were, of course

• Which book would you make compulsory reading?
  Animal Farm by George Orwell - but he would have hated any book to be made compulsory reading.

February 15 1998

ALEC GUINNESS hates Dr Zhivago, avoids difficult books and loves Gulliver's Travels

• What books are you reading now?
  Pickwick Papers, Missing the Midnight by Jane Gardam, Saints & Sinners by Eamon Duffy

• What is your favourite place to read?
  In bed

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  Anthony Trollope

• What is the most difficult book you have read?
  If it is even slightly difficult, I don't read it

• Which book changed your life?
  The book I first read to myself and so acquired a lifetime habit

• Which character do you hate most?
  Uriah Heep in David Copperfield

• What is the first book you can remember reading?
  Alice in Wonderland

• What is your favourite children's book?
  Just William

• What is your funniest book?
  Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

• What is the most erotic book you have read?
  The Manxman, by Hall Caine - or so it seemed to me at age circa 17

• What is your most overrated book?
  Dr Zhivago

• What is your most underrated book?
  Most of J B Priestley's novels

• Who is your favourite character?
  Lady Glencora Palliser (in several Trollope novels)

• Who would be your ideal literary dining companion?
  Robert Louis Stevenson

• What is your most embarrassing book?
  Cry Havoc by Beverley Nichols

• Which book has been worst adapted for the screen?
  Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde in about 12 versions

• What is your favourite quotation?
  "The readiness is all" (Hamlet)

• What is your most thrilling moment in a play?
  The first act curtain in J M Barrie's Dear Brutus, when the audience realises the wood has advanced to the drawing room

• What is your favourite play?
  The Cherry Orchard

• Which book did you never want to end?
  Trollope's Dr Thorne

• What is your most exciting line of poetry?
  "Stand in the trench, Achilles, flame-capped, and shout for me." Patrick Shaw Stewart, killed 1917

• Which book would you make compulsory reading?
  Swift's Gulliver's Travels

February 22 1998

FRANCES PARTRIDGE, Bloomsbury's great survivor, selects her loves and hates

• Which book are you reading now?
  Henry James's The Wings of the Dove (second time around)

• When is your favourite time to read?
  On waking in the morning or after going to bed early

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  Turgenev

• Which author do you most admire?
  Henry James, for his original and fascinating style, his hilarious similes and his gloriously abundant output

• What would be your three desert island choices?
  Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux

• Which book did you fail to finish?
  Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient

• Which book should have a sequel?
  I am outraged by those who write sequels to other people's books, as has happened to Jane Austen

• What is your favourite children's book?
  Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass

• What is the first book you can remember reading?
  Little Black Sambo

• What is the most difficult book you have ever read?
  Virginia Woolf's The Waves

• Who is your favourite character?
  Tristram Shandy's Uncle Toby

• What are your favourite poems?
  Shakespeare's Sonnets, Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality

• What is the most erotic work you have read?
  Marvell's To His Coy Mistress: "Had we but world enough, and time . . . "

• What is your favourite play?
  Ibsen's Hedda Gabler

• Who would be your ideal literary dining companion?
  Isaiah Berlin

• What is your saddest book?
  Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain, about a large family, many of whom die one by one, mostly by drowning

• What is your most overrated book?
  Winnie the Pooh

• Which classic do you feel you should have read?
  Thomas Macaulay's Essays

• Which book did you never want to end?
  No such book exists

• Do you ever lend books? If not, why not?
  Yes. I sometimes even force them on unwilling borrowers and then wish I hadn't

• Which book would you make compulsory reading?
  What a rotten idea

March 1 1998

LOUIS DE BERNIERES hates Moby Dick but has time for Noddy

• Which book are you reading now?
  A la recherche du temps perdu (malheureusement)

• When is your favourite time to read?
  I read every night in the bath until the water goes cold

• Which contemporary author do you most admire?
  Rohinton Mistry - sad, funny, angry and humane

• Which character do you hate most?
  The narrator of Zorba the Greek. His obsession with religion is truly irritating

• With which character would you most like to have an affair?
  I'd like to have a fling with Gabriela (in Jorge Amado's Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon)

• What is the first book you can remember reading?
  Noddy by Enid Blyton. Can't remember which one

• What is your favourite children's book?
  Moonfleet by J Meade Falkner. Smuggling and skeletons!

• What is the funniest book you have read?
  Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia & the Scriptwriter

• What is the saddest book you have read?
  The deaths of young women or cats always affect me quite deeply

• What is the most erotic book you have read?
  Women are sexy - sex in books is inadvertently comic

• Which books do you avoid?
  Books about having an affair with your best friend's partner, while trying to write a novel

• Which book did you never want to end?
  Innocent Erendira (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) - poetry from start to finish

• Do you have a comfort book that you re-read?
  Pablo Neruda's Elemental Odes is inexhaustible

• Which poem can you recite by heart?
  "Shall I compare thee . . . "

• Which book would you like to see filmed?
  Cousin Basilio by Eca de Queiros. A tragic adultery

• Do you ever lend books? If not, why not?
  No! I wouldn't lend my cat or my sister either

• Which book should have a sequel?
  The New Testament. He promised to come back soon

• Which book changed your life?
  The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. I realised that books don't require heroes

• What is your most overrated book?
  Moby Dick. Like watching a race between dead snails

• Which book would you make compulsory reading?
  A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft - a classic that remains completely contemporary

March 8 1998

P D JAMES gives Mr Rochester the thumbs down, but could have handled Captain Wentworth

• Which books are you reading now?
  The Letters of Dorothy L Sayers edited by Barbara Reynolds, Felicia's Journey by William Trevor, Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes, Déjà Dead by Kathy Reichs and the Prayer Book

• When is your favourite time to read?
  In the morning when I'm not tired, an indulgence that is rarely possible except when travelling

• Where is your favourite place to read?
  A British Airways first-class seat at 29,000ft. Comfort, good light, and I know I shan't be interrupted

• What is the first book you remember reading?
  A comic called The Rainbow. I can remember the huge satisfaction with which one week - and, it seemed, totally mysteriously - I could read it myself instead of waiting for my mother to find time

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  Jane Austen

• Which character do you hate most?
  Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre. I took against this arrogant bully when I first read the novel as a child, and time has reinforced my deep-seated prejudice

• What is the most difficult book you have read?
  Ulysses. I don't think I would have attempted it if it hadn't been a favourite of my Anglo-Irish husband

• What is the funniest book you have read?
  Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall

• What is the most erotic book you have read?
  John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill)

• Do you have a comfort book that you reread?
  Any Nancy Mitford novel, or any of the Jeeves books by P G Wodehouse

• With which character would you like to have an affair?
  Now, probably none! In youth, with Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion. He is handsome, courageous, amusing, compassionate and faithful; what more can a girl want?

• Who would be your ideal literary dining companion?
  Isabel Archer from The Portrait of a Lady. I long to ask her why, with plenty of money and no children, she returns, at the end, to her despicable husband

• Which classic should you have read?
  Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. I have been waiting until my French is sufficiently proficient to read it in the original, and now accept that it never will be. And I'm tired of references to that madeleine!

• Which school text did you most enjoy?
  High Roads of History, which was our text book when I was at my state primary school in the 1920s, and which helped to give me a lasting love of history

• Which book changed your life?
  The Prayer Book, which I read from the age of five during the longueurs of the Sunday sermon, and which taught me that language can be noble

JOHN CAREY applauds Mr Polly but finds Dickens's Steerforth the most ghastly snob

• Where is your favourite place to read?
  On, but not in, a bed, with a cat curled up asleep on my stomach

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  Dickens - the Inimitable. Who else combines such poetic imagination with such wild humour?

• And your favourite character?
  Mr Polly in H G Wells's The History of Mr Polly. Downtrodden draper quits failing business and awful wife to discover country idyll

• What is you favourite poem?
  Paradise Lost. An endless moral maze, introducing literature's first Romantic, Satan

• And your favourite play?
  A Midsummer's Night's Dream

• What is your favourite quotation?
  "Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit," Virgil (roughly translates as "Maybe this will all seem quite funny one day")

• What is the first book you can remember reading?
  Capt W E Johns, Spitfire Parade (Biggles wins the Battle of Britain)

• Name three desert island choices?
  The poems of Browning, Hardy and Larkin

• Which school text did you most enjoy?
  A G McDonnell, England, Their England (read to us by our English master as a treat)

• Which classic should you have read?
  Ruskin's Modern Painters - a five-volume masterpiece by a many-sided Victorian genius. Takes time

• What book did you never want to end?
  Arnold Bennett's The Card (1911) - adventures of a bright lad on the make, just the type the first world war was to kill off in their thousands

• What is your favourite children's book?
  Winnie the Pooh. Has characters you go on meeting through life

• What is your funniest book?
  S J Perelman, The Road to Milltown

• And saddest?
  Tennyson, In Memoriam - a bleak lament for dead friend and waning Christianity

• What is the most erotic book you've read?
  Pauline Réage, The Story of O. Not for the politically correct

• Do you have a comfort book that you re-read?
  Conan Doyle, Collected Sherlock Holmes Stories

• Which author do you most admire?
  George Orwell: a truth-teller and master-stylist

• What is your most overrated book?
  Sterne, Tristram Shandy. Smutty, sentimental: a favourite with intellectuals

• Which character do you hate most?
  Steerforth in David Copperfield - a snob and bully, weirdly loved by Victorian readers

March 22 1998

FREDERICK FORSYTH likes to spend time with all-action heroes

• Which book or books are you reading now?
  Phantom of the Opera - the original by Gaston Leroux. Also How We Squandered the Reich by Reinhard Spitzy

• What is your favourite place to read?
  In an armchair by the fire, or poolside on holiday

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  No particular one above all others

• Who is your favourite character?
  John le Carré's George Smiley

• What is your favourite play?
  At the moment, Art, by Yasmina Reza. Wonderful

• What is you favourite poem?
  Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

• Name three desert island choices?
  Lofty Wiseman's SAS Survival Handbook (useful); T E Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (gripping); The Bible (I could be there a long time)

• What is your favourite children's book?
  Any of the Rider Haggards

• Which author do you most admire?
  T E Lawrence

• Name your most underrated book?
  Brown on Resolution, by C S Forester

• Who is your favourite character?
  Able Seaman Brown - see above

• Which character do you hate most?
  Wackford Squeers - a loathsome sadist

• With which character do you most identify?
  The muskrat in Rikki-Tikki-Tavy - if you think I'm tangling with cobras, forget it

• With which character would you most like to have an affair?
  Rosie - as in Cider with

• Who would be your ideal literary dining companions?
  Jack London, Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway - but there would be a fight before coffee

• What is your most embarrassing passage or book?
  Any of my own early stuff

• What book would you like to see filmed?
  Icon - the sale would help with the latest tax bill

• Which book should have a sequel?
  Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country

• Which contemporary author do you most admire?
  Elizabeth Longford - she brings great history alive

• Which book changed your life?
  The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations

• Which book would you make compulsory reading?
  Same again - wit and wisdom from five centuries

March 29 1998

The poet THOM GUNN reads Moby Dick and Ulysses as if they were verse

• Which book are you reading now?
  Nazimova by Gavin Lambert

• When is your favourite time to read?
  Morning or afternoon; I'm too drunk in the evening

• Where is your favourite place to read?
  In the back garden

• What is the first book you can remember reading?
  Little Men by Louisa May Alcott

• What is your favourite children's book?
  The Bastables Trilogy by E Nesbit

• Who is your favourite character?
  Falstaff, wicked and funny in equal degrees

• What are the most difficult books you have read?
  Moby Dick and Ulysses, until I realised you have to read them aloud like poetry, and now I've read both of them several times

• What is the funniest book you have read?
  Martin Chuzzlewit, perhaps. The scene at Todgers made me laugh aloud when I was 16, and then again in my forties

• Which book would you like to see filmed?
  The Fifth Queen by Ford Madox Ford would be the best costume film ever made

• What is the worst screen adaptation?
  The Brothers Karamazov. The script was so respectful; it tried to get everything in, so the story went at such breakneck speed it was funny in a bizarre way

• Which author do you most admire?
  Surprise, it's Shakespeare

• What is your most overrated book?
  The poetry of Joseph Brodsky. He was terribly persecuted in Russia, but that really doesn't mean that he could write English poetry

• Who would be your ideal literary dining companion?
  I want dinner with the modernist poet Mina Loy

• Which book should have a sequel?
  Isherwood's autobiography; it would have been where we heard about Hollywood in the 1940s

• Do you have a comfort book that you re-read?
  Henry James's What Maisie Knew

• With which author would you most like to have an affair?
  Christopher Marlowe

• Which contemporary author do you most admire?
  There is nobody alive better than Robert Stone (especially in A Flag for Sunrise)

• Which book did you fail to finish?
  Martin Amis's London Fields. I loved it at first, and then it got so pretentious I turned against it

• Which poem or lines can you recite by heart?
  Ginsberg once astonished a group of students by reciting the whole of Lycidas; I know only the first page

April 5 1998

A S BYATT relaxes with Terry Pratchett and likes the sound of Easy Rawlins

• Which book or books are you reading now?
  Passionate Minds, edited by Lewis Wolpert and Alison Richards, and, slowly, Musil's Man without Qualities

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  Proust, Balzac, George Eliot. Impossible to choose

• What is you favourite poem?
  Andrew Marvell's The Garden

• What is the most difficult book you have ever read?
  Herman Melville's Pierre or The Ambiguities. An intransigent work of genius I shall never attempt again

• What is the first book you can remember reading?
  The House at Pooh Corner. I remember stopping and noticing that I had simply been reading without thinking about how to read

• What is your favourite children's book?
  The Hobbit. I prefer myths and legends to the doings of imaginary children

• Which school text did you most enjoy?
  Paradise Lost, IX and X. I thought it would be heavy; it was a revelation

• What is the most erotic book you've read?
  I think Donne's Songs and Sonnets. The poems seduce women readers. They are interactive

• What is your funniest book?
  Evelyn Waugh's Scoop

• What is your most overrated book?
  Lucky Jim. A sugar-coating of Beano infantile humour over a surly and sadistic view of human life

• And your most underrated?
  Ford Madox Ford, the Parade's End tetralogy. One of the very great modern novels. Obscured by the reputation of that coldly perfect narrative, The Good Soldier, it is much more exciting

• Who are your ideal dining companions?
  Coleridge, William James and D J Enright. They all know vast quantities about things I'd like to be told about; all are without malice or pomposity

• Do you have a comfort book that you re-read?
  Terry Pratchett's Discworld stories

• What is your most embarrassing passage or book?
  Albert Cohen's Belle du Seigneur. A narcissistic, self-satisfied piece of grandiose titillation

• Which character do you hate most?
  Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park. Small-minded, motiveless malignity, Iago in a teacup

• With which character do you most identify?
  Lucy Snowe in Villette. She is what I was afraid of becoming. Solitary, clever and trapped

• With which character would you have an affair?
  He must be a man not a boy. And kind. And attractive. I came up with Paul D, in Beloved, and Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins. I was rather surprised that they were both black and poor. Fortunately, I am not required to consider what they would think of the idea

April 12 1998

RICHARD E GRANT would happily share a sandwich with Algy Moncrieff

• Which books are you reading now?
  Don DeLillo's Underworld. George Plimpton's biography of Truman Capote. Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works. By turns

• When is your favourite time to read?
  When I'm supposed to be doing something else

• Where is your favourite place to read?
  Under the covers, with a torch, when I was nine

• Who are your favourite novelists?
  Enid Blyton/Martin Amis/Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The first two probably appalled to be linked, but all the more quintessentially English for being so. And Garcia Marquez for equatorial, fetid romanticism that reminds me I grew up in the heat with my head in the cold of England romping with the Famous Five, prior to discovering Amis's Ladbroke Grove

• What is your favourite quotation?
  "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans." John Lennon

• What is the first book you remember reading?
  The Secret Seven by Enid Blyton. Which my daughter has been similarly gripped by, 33 years after I first was

• Which classic should you have read?
  "Should" be damned. Along with "if only", "could've" and "would have"

• Who is your favourite character?
  Pinocchio. I am a hopeless liar, was deemed "wooden" in a Shakespearian effort, love Italian food and was introduced to acting via the gift of two marionettes

• What is the most erotic book you have read?
  The Godfather - specifically page 26, when Sonny Corleone and the bridesmaid avail themselves of each other. Known word for word by most adolescents c1972

• What is your favourite play?
  Short and preferably without an interval.

• Who would be an ideal literary dining companion?
  Algernon Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest, who understood that the sandwich is an unbeatably perfect meal to accompany a lifelong pursuit of pleasure

• Name your most underrated book?
  Masai Dreaming by Justin Cartwright, an epic that begins in the Rift valley and ends in Auschwitz

• And most overrated?
  Compilations of aphorisms found in Christmas stockings. Usually titled "Little Book of . . . "

• Do you have a comfort book?
  Love in the Time of Cholera by Garcia Marquez. Love, longing, mangos, tropics, lust, madness and loss

• With which character would you have an affair?
  The aforementioned bridesmaid in The Godfather

• Which book changed your life?
  Maths for Beginners. I knew, irrevocably, that I was never going to make it into astronaut school

April 19 1998

HILARY MANTEL reveals her secret vice - quoting Belloc, but always under her breath

• Which book are you reading now?
  The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd

• When is your favourite time to read?
  At dusk, when edges blur and anything seems possible

• Where is your favourite place to read?
  The small room in our house known as the Cats' Sitting Room

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  Ivy Compton-Burnett

• What is the most difficult book you have ever read?
  The Little Speckled Hen. I was six. The boredom nearly killed me

• What is the first book you can remember reading?
  Stories about King Arthur and his knights

• Which contemporary authors do you most admire?
  Margaret Atwood and R K Narayan

• What is your favourite quotation?
  My secret vice is quoting Belloc, but always under my breath

• What is you favourite poem?
  A Nocturnal on Saint Lucy's Day by John Donne

• What is your favourite children's book?
  Alice Through the Looking Glass

• Which classic should you have read?
  A la recherche du temps perdu

• Which school text did you most enjoy?
  Brighton Rock by Graham Greene: but now I think it counterfeit

• Which author do you most admire?
  Shakespeare. Sorry to be dull. But he shaped the world for me

• What is the funniest book you have read?
  Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters

• And saddest?
  Beloved by Toni Morrison

• With which character do you most identify?
  Angel Deverell, the mad, bad author in Elizabeth Taylor's Angel

• Who is your favourite character?
  Alan Breck in Kidnapped

• What is your most overrated book?
  Sons and Lovers by D H Lawrence

• And most underrated?
  Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane

• Name three desert island choices?
  The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Wisden Book of Cricketers' Lives and Good Behaviour by Molly Keane

• Which book changed your life?
  A schoolbook called Steps to Literature, in which I first found Shakespeare when I was eight

April 26 1998

MAUREEN LIPMAN adored Ballet Shoes and admires Salman Rushdie

• Which books are you reading now?
  Underworld by Don DeLillo and The Year of Meat by Ruth Ozeki

• What is your favourite time and place to read?
  At night, in bed

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  Lately, Carol Shields - but it changes

• Who is your favourite character?
  Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

• Who would be ideal literary dining companions?
  Margaret Atwood, Hermione Lee, Alain de Botton, Arthur Miller, Sebastian Faulks, Carol Shields, Fay Weldon, Stephen Pinker (or, perhaps, just me and J D Salinger)

• What are your favourite plays?
  Uncle Vanya and The Front Page

• What is your funniest book?
  Good as Gold by Joseph Heller

• What is your favourite quotation?
  "There are several mechanical devices said to increase sexual arousal in women. Chief amongst these is the Mercedes 280SL Convertible." P J O'Rourke

• And saddest?
  Recently, Giant's House by Elizabeth McKracken, Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels and Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

• What is the first book you can remember reading?
  Bembo the Hobgoblin

• Which classic should you have read?
  Villette by Charlotte Brontë and all of Trollope

• Which book should have a sequel?
  The Diary of Anne Frank (I'm not being facetious, only ironic)

• Which contemporary author do you most admire?
  Salman Rushdie (for his social life as well as his prose)

• Do you have comfort books you reread?
  The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing; all Jane Austen

• Which book would you make compulsory reading?
  The Mill on the Floss (but then reading should never be compulsory)

• With which character do you most identify?
  Jo in Little Women

• Which book would you like to see filmed?
  Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

• With which character would you have an affair?
  George Eliot's Daniel Deronda

• What are the most difficult books you have read?
  See Under: Love by David Grossman and Love, Again by Doris Lessing

• Which book changed your life?
  Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild

May 3 1998

HARDY AMIES wants films to get the costumes right and has designs on Lady Bracknell

• Which book are you reading now?
  Sir Joseph Banks: A Life by Patrick O'Brian

• When is your favourite time to read?
  Early evening, on or in bed

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  Charles Dickens

• What is your favourite children's book?
  The Bible Retold by Selina Hastings

• What is your favourite play?
  Le Malade Imaginaire by Molière

• What is the worst screen adaptation?
  Any period piece - they never get the costumes right

• Which author do you most admire?
  Isaiah Berlin

• What is you favourite poem?
  The Scholar-Gipsy by Matthew Arnold

• What is your favourite quotation?
  From Kant: "From the crooked wood of which humanity is made, nothing can be carpented"

• What is the first book you can remember reading?
  The Indiscretions of a Lady's Maid by William Le Queux

• What is your funniest book?
  Almanach de Gotha

• And saddest?
  Chips Channon's diaries

• What is the most erotic book you have read?
  Tom Brown's Schooldays

• What is the most difficult book you have read?
  Europe by Norman Davies - so heavy

• Who is your favourite character?
  Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia

• What is your most overrated book?
  I never read overrated books

• What is your most underrated book?
  The Englishman's Suit by Hardy Amies

• With which character would you most like to have an affair?
  Lady Bracknell

• Which character do you hate most?
  I don't hate anyone - I'm by nature good-hearted

• Who would be an ideal literary dining companion?
  Selina Hastings

• What is your most embarrassing passage or book?
  Don't read books that include these

• Do you have a comfort book you re-read?
  Yes, Proust

• Which book changed your life?
  Not having books would have changed my life

JOANNA TROLLOPE identifies with a cocktail of Jane Austen's heroines

• Which books are you reading now?
  William Boyd's Armadillo and Jenny Uglow's Hogarth

• When is your favourite time to read?
  Absolutely any time and all the time if only I dared and could

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  George Eliot

• Who are your favourite characters?
  Almost all of Anthony Trollope's women

• What is the first book you can remember reading?
  The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, but there must have been dozens before that

• Which school text did you most enjoy?
  King Lear and Wordsworth's Prelude

• What is your favourite children's book?
  The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

• Name your funniest book?
  Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood by Gwen Raverat

• And your saddest book?
  Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset

• Which contemporary authors do you most admire?
  They include William Trevor, Jane Gardam and Penelope Fitzgerald

• What is your favourite quotation?
  Philip Toynbee: "Moral progress is the realisation that other human beings are fully as human as you are"

• Do you have a comfort book that you re-read?
  Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond

• What is your most underrated book?
  Among modern fiction, Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety

• With which character do you most identify?
  A sort of cocktail of all of Jane Austen's heroines, with the exception of dismal little Fanny Price

• Who would be your ideal literary dining companions?
  For a dinner party of six: Mrs Gaskell, Oliver Goldsmith, Sheridan, Thackeray and Sylvia Townsend Warner

• With which character would you like to have an affair?
  At the moment, Captain Corelli in Louis de Bernières's Captain Corelli's Mandolin

• What is your most embarrassing passage or book?
  Any solemn sex scene in anything

• What book would you like to see filmed?
  I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

• What is the worst screen adaptation?
  I thought the last version of Emma was pretty dire

• Which book would you make compulsory reading?
  One isn't enough, but the Bible and The Oxford Book of English Verse for starters

May 17 1998

JOANNA LUMLEY identifies with Elizabeth and lusts after Darcy

• Which books are you reading now?
  Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh and Ted Hughes's Ovid

• When is your favourite time to read?
  At night, in bed

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  Anthony Powell

• Who is your favourite character?
  Widmerpool

• With which character do you most identify?
  Elizabeth Bennet, of course

• With which character would you most like to have an affair?
  Darcy, obviously

• Which character do you hate most?
  Pinky in Brighton Rock

• What is your favourite quotation?
  Nil desperandum

• What is you favourite poem?
  Cargoes by John Masefield, and any Keats poem

• Which contemporary author do you most admire?
  E Annie Proulx, Salman Rushdie, William Boyd, Martin Amis, Anita Brookner and Paul Theroux

• What is the first book you can remember reading?
  Little Pig Robinson

• What is your favourite children's book?
  The Silver Curlew by Eleanor Farjeon

• Which school text did you most enjoy?
  Kennedy's Eating Primer!

• Which classic should you have read?
  John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress

• What is the most difficult book you have ever read?
  A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

• What is the funniest book you have read?
  Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome, The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith and Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm

• And saddest?
  Lloyd C Douglas's The Robe, when I read it aged 13

• What is the most erotic book you have read?
  The Stars Look Down by A J Cronin, when I was 14

• Do you have comfort books you reread?
  A Dance to the Music of Time, Just William and Rebecca

• Who would be ideal literary dining companions?
  Falstaff, Max de Winter, Pamela Flitton, Lady Capulet

• What is your most overrated book?
  Jonathan Livingston Seagull

• Which book would you make compulsory reading?
  Come Hither, Walter de la Mare

May 24 1998

DAVID LODGE is amused by Vile Bodies but never got round to War and Peace

• Which books are you reading now?
  Paul by A N Wilson, John Horgan's The End of Science and re-reading Henry James's The Wings of the Dove

• When is your favourite time to read?
  Evening in winter; afternoon in summer, in the garden

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  Hard to choose between Jane Austen and Dickens

• Who is your favourite character?
  Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye

• What is your favourite poem?
  Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings

• What is your favourite quotation?
  "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." (W B Yeats)

• What is your favourite play?
  Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest

• What is the most difficult book you have ever read?
  The Wings of the Dove seems a strong contender

• Which classic should you have read?
  War and Peace by Tolstoy

• What is your funniest book?
  Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

• You saddest book?
  The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

• And the most erotic?
  My Secret Life by "Walter"

• What is your favourite children's book?
  In childhood, any of the William books by Richmal Crompton. In adulthood, Alice in Wonderland

• Which school text did you most enjoy?
  Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle (A-level set text)

• Which contemporary author do you most admire?
  Muriel Spark

• Do you have a comfort book that you re-read?
  I used to read Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat in this way as a boy

• Name your most underrated book?
  Gilbert Adair: The Death of the Author

• Who would be an ideal literary dining companion?
  Henry James - he dined out 107 times in the winter of 1878-79, so he must have been good at it

• Which author do you most admire?
  James Joyce - the ultimate perfectionist

• What book would you like to see filmed?
  A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy

• Which book should have a sequel?
  The Catcher in the Rye (perhaps J D Salinger has one in his hoard of unpublished manuscripts)

May 31 1998

CRAIG RAINE, Sunday Times writer of the year, hates Hanif and is tickled by Ted

• Which books are you reading now?
  Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nicholson Baker's The Everlasting Story of Nory, Adam Thorpe's Still

• Where is your favourite place to read?
  The kitchen, before it wakes up, when all its surfaces are clear and clean

• What is the first book you remember reading?
  Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped - told in pictures on the back page of The Topper (a comic)

• What is your favourite quotation?
  "What has been believed by all, always and everywhere, has every likelihood of being untrue" - Paul Valéry. Think of Freud. Think of God

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  James Joyce

• Which school text did you most enjoy?
  Sons and Lovers: the working class makes its proper literary debut, not a comic walk-on role

• What is the most erotic book you have read?
  My vote goes to Tomi Ungerers's Pornopticon - drawings at once stirring and absurd

• What is your funniest book?
  I was once asked to leave the Bodleian for laughing repeatedly over Ted Hughes's The Iron Man

• What is your most overrated book?
  I think they're all fantastically underrated. Oh, you mean, other people's books. Canetti's Auto-Da-Fé

• Name your most underrated book
  The Bible - as literature

• Which characters do you hate most?
  Mordecai boring for Israel in Daniel Deronda. Esther Summerson boring for virtue in Bleak House

• With which character do you most identify?
  Late at night, sometimes with Beckett's Molloy who has trouble remembering his own name

• What is the worst screen adaptation?
  The recent vulgar travesty of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove

• What is your most embarrassing passage?
  "It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back" - the opening sentence of Hanif Kureishi's Intimacy. That "for"

• What is you favourite poem?
  Browning's The Ring and the Book or Whitman's A Song of Myself - both contain multitudes

• Which book changed your life?
  Ulysses showed me everything was interesting. Actually, Jane Austen tells you the same thing, in a different way. Nothing is dull if you write about it well

• Which book would you make compulsory reading?
  Coercion is alien to the spirit of literature - but everyone should be encouraged to read Clough's great masterpiece, Amours de Voyage

June 7 1998

PIERS PAUL READ admires St Augustine's passion for God and women

• Which books are you reading now?
  Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin by Alexandra Richie; Medieval Islam by Gustav E von Grunebaum

• When is your favourite time to read?
  The morning, when my mind is clearest

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  Dostoevsky, for his peerless Christian melodrama

• Who is your favourite character?
  Braz Cubas in Machado de Assis's Epitaph of a Small Winner

• What is your favourite play?
  Chekhov's Uncle Vanya - it reminds me of my Yorkshire childhood

• What is your favourite quotation?
  "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Ecclesiastes 1:2

• What is the most difficult book you have ever read?
  Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain: hard to climb but a great view from the top

• What is the first book you can remember reading?
  Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, when I was still in the nursery

• Which school text did you most enjoy?
  John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga - one of my A-level texts

• What is your funniest book?
  Tristram Shandy, precursor to Salman Rushdie et al

• And saddest?
  C by Maurice Baring - a dapper socialite's tragic unfulfilment

• With which character do you most identify?
  Julien Sorel in Scarlet and Black

• With which character would you most like to have an affair?
  Madeleine Forestier in Maupassant's Bel Ami

• Which character do you hate most?
  Vronsky in Anna Karenina

• Which author do you most admire?
  St Augustine, who has an exquisite passion for God and women

• Who would be ideal literary dining companions?
  Stendhal, Alexander Herzen, Russia's great 19th-century man of letters, and Patrick Leigh Fermor

• What is your most embarrassing book?
  The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort

• Which book should have a sequel?
  Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man

• Which contemporary author do you most admire?
  Philip Roth

• Which book changed your life?
  Crime and Punishment; it made me want to be a writer

• Which book would you make compulsory reading?
  St Augustine's Confessions

June 14 1998

STEPHEN FRY identifies with Mrs Danvers - to a surprisingly intimate degree

• Which books are you reading now?
  Snowblind by Robert Sabbag and The Pickwick Papers by Dickens

• Where is your favourite place to read, and when?
  Bed, at bed-time

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  Hum. Dickens, probably

• What are your favourite plays?
  Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya

• Who is your favourite character?
  Er . . . Psmith (P G Wodehouse)

• Which character do you hate most?
  Milly Molly Mandy

• What is the funniest book you have read?
  Right Ho, Jeeves by Wodehouse

• And the saddest book?
  Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

• What is your favourite quotation?
  "Never quote" - Stephen Fry

• Which classic should you have read?
  George Eliot's Middlemarch

• Do you have a comfort book that you re-read?
  Psmith in the City

• Which author do you most admire?
  James Joyce

• Who would be ideal literary dining companions?
  Wilde, Shakespeare, Reggie Turner

• Which school text did you most enjoy?
  William Golding's Lord of the Flies (naturally)

• With which character do you most identify?
  Mrs Danvers in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca

• With which character would you have an affair?
  See above

• What is your most overrated book?
  Women in Love by D H Lawrence

• Name your most underrated book
  Surface Tension by Greg Snow

• What is your most embarrassing passage or book?
  My most embarrassing passage is my own affair

• Which book would you like to see filmed?
  Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies

• What is the worst screen adaptation?
  The above, which I am working on

• Which book changed your life?
  Escape from the Shadows by Robin Maugham

• Which book would you make compulsory reading?
  Norwich A-Z. No works of literature should be compulsory

June 28 1998

ALAN SILLITOE fancies an affair with Delilah but is bored stiff by The Pilgrim's Progress

• Which book or books are you reading now?
  Our Mutual Friend (again); The Complete Works and Letters of Georg Büchner (again); Paddle to the Amazon by Don Starkell

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  Stendhal - for The Charterhouse of Parma - with Balzac's preface

• Who is your favourite character?
  Fabrizio del Dongo, hero of the above. He was at the Battle of Waterloo, and didn't realise it

• What is your favourite play?
  The Homecoming - the brutality reminds me of my younger days

• What is your favourite quotation?
  "Painting is jealous, and requires the whole man to himself" - Michelangelo - for me it means writing as well

• What is the first book you can remember reading?
  The Count of Monte Cristo

• What is your funniest book?
  Gil Blas by Le Sage, translated by Smollett, a great picaresque novel

• And saddest?
  A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison

• What is the most erotic book you've read?
  Musil's A Man without Qualities - when, in the latter part of the novel, he muses on the smouldering love between brother and sister

• Do you have a comfort book that you re-read?
  The King James Bible - Job or the Psalms, but any book will do in a storm

• Which author do you most admire?
  Albert Cohen, for Belle du Seigneur

• What is your most overrated book?
  The Pilgrim's Progress - I struggled manfully, but it bored me to death

• Name your most underrated book
  The Family Mashber by Der Nistor. An extraordinary novel. The writer died in a prison hospital in Russia, in 1950

• Which character do you hate most?
  Fledgeby, in Our Mutual Friend, for his tormenting of Riah

• With which character would you most like to have an affair with?
  Delilah - but I'd have a short back and sides first

• What book would you like to see filmed?
  American Pastoral by Philip Roth - with trepidation, because it's such a good novel

• Which book changed your life?
  The Forest Giant by Adrien le Corbeau, translated by T E Lawrence. I re-read it recently and see why

• Which book would you make compulsory reading?
  None - ideally. At my school I never had to read anything, so I read everything

ANN WIDDECOMBE hates Lady Macbeth but identifies with Tigger

• Which book are you reading now?
  Jane Austen's Persuasion

• When is your favourite time to read?
  At the end of the day, on the bed

• What is your favourite poem?
  Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard

• What is your favourite quotation?
  Carpe diem

• Who is your favourite novelist?
  C P Snow

• Who is your favourite character?
  Aeneas

• What is your favourite play?
  Richard II

• Name three desert-island choices
  Horace poems, Knowledge of Angels by Jill Paton Walsh, A A Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh

• What is the most difficult book you have ever read?
  Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock

• Which classic should you have read?
  The Pilgrim's Progress (ouch! but I really haven't)

• What is your funniest book?
  The Code of the Woosters by P G Wodehouse

• And saddest?
  All Quiet on the Western Front

• What is the most erotic book you have read?
  I don't read filth

• Do you have a comfort book that you re-read?
  The Jungle Books, Pride and Prejudice

• Which author do you most admire?
  A A Milne

• What is your most overrated book?
  The Satanic Verses (yawwwn)

• Which character do you hate most?
  Lady Macbeth (eeek!)

• With which characters do you identify?
  Captain Wentworth (most human of all Austen's deadly heroes), Tigger (always bounces back)

• With which character would you most like to have an affair?
  I would do nothing so indecent but, er - Rudolph Rassendyll from The Prisoner of Zenda?

• Who would be an ideal literary dining companion?
  John Buchan

• What is your most embarrassing passage or book?
  An awful lot of Catullus - he's either very good or very bad

• Which book would you like to see filmed?
  The Aeneid

• Which book changed your life?
  Who Moved the Stone? by Frank Morrison

July 12 1998

Find out why TERRY WAITE would take the SAS Survival Handbook to a desert island

Which book are you reading now?
All My Roads Before Me: The Diary of C S Lewis 1922-27, which I have had since 1992 and only just got round to reading. Lewis would sit down and read Homer and Herodotus before doing the washing up. It's taken me six years to catch up with back reading

Where is your favourite place to read?
In captivity. No phone. No callers. No nothing. (For a long time, no books)

What is the first book you remember reading?
The Three Little Kittens; I won it as a Sunday School prize when I was three

What is the most difficult book you have read?
Finnegans Wake, which I am still reading (with the aid of a crib)

Which contemporary author do you most admire?
John Updike paints wonderful character studies

Who is your favourite character?
Today, I will choose Captain Joshua Slocum of Alone Round the World

What is the most erotic book you have read?
I interpret "erotic" as that which pertains to sexual encounter. Therefore, Frank Harris's My Life and Loves. I read only half, as someone broke into my car and took my suitcase! I thought Harris was such a nutcase that I didn't buy another copy. I did buy another case

And saddest?
Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a sad, nostalgic, yet somewhat comforting book

Name three desert island choices
The SAS Survival Handbook. Which I shall need in order to have the stamina to manage the following: The Complete Cambridge History, The Complete History of Philosophy

What is your most overrated book?
Taken on Trust by Terry Waite!

Who would make your ideal dining companion?
Mrs Beeton - she seemed to cater for large appetites

With which character would you like to have an affair?
Mrs Beeton - she seemed to cater for large appetites

With which character do you most identify?
The short answer is that I don't. I am who I am

What is your favourite quotation?
"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live" (Thoreau)

What is the worst screen adaptation?
Every film I have seen dealing with a biblical theme

Which book changed your life?
The collected works of Jung. He taught me that the inner world is as important as the world in which we live and have our being

Which book would you make compulsory reading?
I wouldn't. I would attempt to make books so interesting that my students would beg me to read them

Villette has JAN MORRIS weeping buckets, but John Cheever never lets her down

Which books are you reading now?
I'm working on a book about Abraham Lincoln, so am deep in the 10,000-odd previous works on him

Where is your favourite place to read?
In bed, with my breakfast, which is why so many of my books are marmalade-sticky

Who is your favourite novelist?
What a ridiculous question

What is your favourite play?
Ibsen's The Master Builder; to read, not to see, because I dislike going to the theatre, but love transporting myself to 19th-century Norway

And your favourite poem?
What a ridiculous question

What is the first book you remember reading?
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in my grandfather's copy, and I read it to this day

What is the most erotic book you have read?
The Arabian Nights, I suppose - I'm not much good on eroticism

What is your funniest book?
The Best of Beachcomber edited by Michael Frayn

And saddest?
Villette by Charlotte Brontë, which I can only remember through a veil of tears

What is your most overrated book?
Moby Dick, but Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy comes a close second, and Northanger Abbey third, but it's a matter of taste, not judgment

Which classic should you have read?
Anything by Sir Walter Scott

What is your favourite children's book?
Alice in Wonderland, without a doubt

Do you have a comfort book you re-read?
Yes, the one-volume Short Stories of John Cheever never lets me down when I can't sleep and am worrying unnecessarily about my children

With which character would you most like to have an affair?
Hotspur, just my type, even to his affectionate mockery of matters Welsh - a lesson to people like A A Gill

Which author do you most admire?
Living, Patrick Leigh Fermor; dead, Cervantes - artists, adventurers and gentlemen both

Who is your ideal literary dining companion?
I would dearly love to share a partridge and a bottle of Rioja with Don Quixote of La Mancha

Which book changed your life?
Charles Doughty's magical Travels in Arabia Deserta, because it seduced me for a couple of decades into the affairs of the Middle East

Which book would you make compulsory reading?
Oh come now, I don't want to make anything else compulsory: crash helmets are bad enough

FAY WELDON has a predilection for wounded heroes and read Marie Stopes at 10

Which book are you reading now?

Hilaire Belloc's Selected Essays, Penguin Books (price 2/6). In particular, one written 60 years ago on Jane Austen - whom he describes as "an ambassadress from her own sex to mine"

When is your favourite time to read?

Any time. Whenever possible. On trains or planes

Where is your favourite place to read?

In the bath. I acquired this habit when a child. The old Herbert Jenkins covers, exposed to steam, would drip red dye down one's hand and arm. What joy!

Who is your favourite novelist?

To praise one is to diminish another. It's like saying who is your favourite child? It might even be myself, in as much as one writes in desperation the book one longs to read and nobody has yet written

What is the saddest book you have read?

Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales

Which contemporary author do you most admire?

Doris Lessing

Who is your favourite character?

I quite like Becky Sharp. Well, not exactly like. Marvel at, perhaps. I fell in love with Captain Hornblower, the archetypal wounded hero, and have hardly recovered since

What is your favourite quotation?

"Least said, soonest mended." "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." Things one's mother thought one needed to hear

What is the most difficult book you have ever read?

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

What is the first book you can remember reading?

Aristophanes's The Frogs. In English. How I learnt to read. Brekekekex, ko-ax! ko-ax!

What is your favourite children's book?

Ferdinand the Bull

With which character do you most identify?

Madame Bovary. All that shopping

What is the most erotic book you have read?

Poor Marie Stopes's Married Love. I was 10 years old

Which character do you hate most?

Angel in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. How could he!

With which character would you most like to have an affair?

Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Before he married Elizabeth, of course

Do you have a comfort book you reread?

No. Do people?

Which book should have a sequel?

Sequels make an agreeable literary exercise, but are not to be taken seriously. When a novel's finished it's finished

Which book changed your life?

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook

GEORGE MELLY reveals that he finds wickedness very sexy, at least in a book

Which book are you reading now?
Paul Bailey's Kitty & Virgil (still in proof). Moving and funny, and not a wasted word

When is your favourite time to read?
Wide awake at 3am

Who is your favourite novelist?
Dickens - alas. I'll explain that "alas" later

What is your favourite play?
The Importance of Being Earnest. Perfectly constructed and never stales

What is your favourite quotation?
"Everything that is squint-eyed, doddering and grotesque is summed up for me in this one word - God" - André Breton

Which character do you hate most?
Lady Marchmain in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, sanctimonious and pious bitch that she is!

Which classic should you have read?
Vanity Fair. Don't know why I haven't, but I usually lie and say I have

What is your favourite children's book?
Kipling's The Jungle Book. It's both wild and cosy. I really envied Mowgli

What is the most erotic book you have read?
Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Wickedness is very sexy, at least in a book

With which character do you most identify?
Falstaff - not only for his character, but also because he is reassuringly fat

With which character would you most like to have an affair?
Emma Bovary. It would end badly, of course, but that is what would make it so exciting!

What is your funniest book?
Cold Comfort Farm. I read it often and always with pleasure, despite Flora being such a bossy-boots

And saddest?
Hardy's Jude the Obscure - it's wonderfully depressing

Do you have a comfort book that you reread?
No. It's a disgusting idea - like a dummy or the edge of a blanket

Which author do you most admire?
Dickens again, alas. So many faults, but when he takes fire he's like a force of nature. For us post-Freudians, too, there's also a fascinating subtext

Which contemporary author do you most admire?
Ruth Rendell probably. Not only that amazing output, but almost all of it first class

Which book changed your life?
Nadja - André Breton. I was already a surrealist in theory; this book wired it up to life

Which book would you make compulsory reading?
None; compulsion and pleasure (or illumination) are natural enemies

Is it shocking that ANTONIA FRASER has never read a word of Dostoevsky?

Which book or books are you reading now?
Memoires secrets et universels des malheurs et de la mort de la Reine de France by Lafont d'Aussone (1836) for a biography of Marie-Antoinette; Two for the Lions by Lindsey Davis (I follow Falco)

When is your favourite time to read?
Any time at all, including when other people are talking or I am supposedly watching television

Where is your favourite place to read?
In my bath, even if there is a high splosh-rate

What is your favourite play?
Old Times by Harold Pinter. Well, I would say that, wouldn't I? (Reader, I married him.) But, as a matter of fact, I first saw the play five years before I met the author

Who is your favourite character?
Bathsheba Everdene in Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd

Which character do you hate most?
Fanny Price in Austen's Mansfield Park equal with Trollope's Lily Dale in The Small House at Allington

With which character would you most like to have an affair?
Steerforth in David Copperfield

Do you have a comfort book that you reread?
Persuasion: my favourite Cinderella story

Which author do you most admire?
Pepys: never a dull moment for him or the reader

What is your most underrated book?
Anything by the novelist Elizabeth Taylor

What is the first book you remember reading?
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell: poor Ginger's death haunts me to this day

What is your most embarrassing passage or book?
I still cringe when people mention A A Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh or, worse still, quote from it

What is your funniest book?
Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn

Which school text did you most enjoy?
Hamlet. Although I was mortified that our English teacher Mother Bridget read Hamlet, leaving me to give my Claudius

Which classic should you have read?
Anything by Dostoevsky, I suppose, since people are always so shocked that I have never read a word

What book would you like to see filmed?
Dickens's Barnaby Rudge: it gives good riot

Which book should have a sequel?
Middlemarch in which Lydgate gets free of his wife (unlike the ending indicated by George Eliot)

Which book changed your life?
Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians led me to biography

DEBORAH MOGGACH likes to read in the morning, because it is wicked

Which books are you reading now?
Forty-six novels, because I am a Whitbread judge, and a book on Vermeer, because I am finishing a novel about a 17th-century Dutch painter

When is your favourite time to read?
In the morning, because it's wicked. Why should it be wicked? "I'm too busy reading to do the ironing," said the mother of children's author Josephine Pullein-Thompson, a woman after my own heart

And your favourite place?
When I was a child, it was sitting back to front on my horse when she was grazing. Her broad rump made a good book rest

Name three desert island choices
John Updike's Rabbit books (I know there are four, but still . . . )

What is the first book you can remember reading?
The Flopsy Bunnies. I remember pondering "soporific lettuces" and thinking there was a lot to learn

With which character would you most like to have an affair?
Morris Zapp, in David Lodge's Small World

Who is your favourite character?
The heroines of Lorrie Moore's short stories because they are doomed to suffer love's indignation

Which classic should you have read?
Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. I have tried, really I have

Do you have a comfort book that you reread?
The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, for its truth, humanity and familiarity

What is your favourite children's book?
Richmal Crompton's Just William books. They are my favourite adult books, too

Which author do you most admire?
Penelope Fitzgerald, because she can spin away in the past and in the present

Name your most underrated authors?
Clare Boylan and Celia Fremlin. They are both rated, but not highly enough

Who are your ideal literary dining companions?
Oscar Wilde, of course, and Charles Dickens on my other side

Which character do you hate most?
Brenda Last in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust. A manipulating bitch

What book would you like to see filmed?
Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate, because I'm just starting to adapt it

Which book would you make compulsory reading?
None. What a ghastly thought

Which book changed your life?
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; its words,"leaves whitening before rain" gave me the same jolt as "soporific lettuces", but in a more advanced way

HUMPHREY CARPENTER loves the pent-up longing in the early chapters of Lolita

Which books are you reading now?
The Selected Short Stories of Raymond Carver; Maeve Binchy's Tara Road for Open Book on Radio 4

Where is your favourite place to read?
In a restaurant by myself, or on a train

Who is your favourite novelist?
Evelyn Waugh, since I first read him at 13

What is your favourite quotation?
"Approval of what is approved of" - John Betjeman. A brilliant way of describing the herd instinct of Groucho Clubland

What is the most erotic book you have read?
The early chapters of Nabokov's Lolita, before he gets her into his bed. An amazing expression of pent-up longing for the apparently unhaveable

What is your favourite play?
Peter Pan, layered with meaning about sexuality and religion

And your funniest book?
The Uncle books by J P Martin, a children's series about an immensely rich elephant who has an enemy called Beaver Hateman. Utterly hilarious, a mixture of Gormenghast and the Marx Brothers

Which school text did you most enjoy?
King Lear. But I did almost no work at school and even less at university. I only started to educate myself when I became a writer

Do you have a comfort book you reread?
Railway maps. The more detailed the better

What is your most overrated book?
Most fiction written in Britain in the past 20 years. Reports of the death of the novel have not been exaggerated

With which character do you most identify?
Whoever is the subject of my latest biography. It's a necessary part of the process of writing a life

Who would be your ideal literary dining companion?
Dennis Potter, whose life I have just finished writing. There's so much I would have wanted to ask him

What is the worst screen adaptation?
Any attempt to film or televise Jane Austen, because the narrator's voice disappears, and that's the most important part of her books

Which book should have a sequel?
None, certainly not by other hands. A deplorable fashion that proves the bareness of the British literary imagination at present

Which contemporary author do you most admire?
Alan Bennett, for reminding us how people really do speak

Which book changed your life?
The Enthusiast by Arthur Calder-Marshall, about a Victorian self-made monk called Father Ignatius. It made me want to write biographies

Reading E M Forster is like drinking skimmed milk, says JULIAN BARNES

Which books are you reading now?
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore and Sibelius Vol III 1914-1957 by Eric Tawaststjerna

Where is your favourite place to read?
Anywhere silent and out of the sun

When is your favourite time to read?
10am-8pm

Who is your favourite novelist?
Flaubert, the saint and martyr of literature

What is the first book you can remember reading?
Thomas the Tank Engine

What is your favourite play?
Chekhov's Uncle Vanya

What is your favourite quotation?
"If you seek to please, you will be undone" (Epictetus)

What is your saddest book?
Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, originally called The Saddest Story

What is the most difficult book you have ever read?
Mallarmé's poems

Name three desert island choices
The Oxford English Dictionary; Flaubert's Letters; and Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book

Which classic should you have read?
Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. I have a fear of relentless jocosity

Which author do you most admire?
Shakespeare

What is your most overrated book?
Most of E M Forster, like drinking skimmed milk

Name your most underrated book
Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (still)

Who would be your ideal literary dining companions?
Turgenev, Edith Wharton, Byron and Dominique Aury

Which school text did you most enjoy?
Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, proof that however English you appeared to be, your sardonic Romantic soul was Russian

Do you have a comfort book that you reread?
No, but it would be useful to write one

What book would you like to see filmed?
Flaubert's Parrot [J Barnes], preferably by Woody Allen, if Bergman is unavailable

Which book should have a sequel?
None, but Byron should have finished Don Juan

Which contemporary author do you most admire?
John Updike, whose most casual tropes can provoke a burn of serious envy

Which book would you make compulsory reading?
No reading should be compulsory

WILLIAM BOYD is full of admiration for Anthony Burgess and his Mr Enderby

What books are you reading now?
My Year Off by Robert McCrum, Coast to Coast by Frederic Raphael and Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh

When is your favourite time to read?
Before lunch

Where is your favourite place to read?
At the kitchen table

Who is your favourite novelist?
Vladimir Nabokov

And your favourite character?
Mr Enderby, the hero of several Anthony Burgess novels

What is your favourite play?
The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov

What is your favourite poem?
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens

What is your favourite quotation?
"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates

What is the most difficult book you have ever read?
The Critique of Pure Reason by Kant

Which classic should you have read?
Tolstoy's War and Peace

What is the first book you can remember reading?
Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book

What is your favourite children's book?
Winnie-the-Pooh by A A Milne

Which school text did you most enjoy?
Life Studies by Robert Lowell

What is your funniest book?
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, or Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, or Dead Souls by Gogol

Do you have a comfort book that you reread?
The English Auden; all his poetry before he went to America

What is your most overrated book?
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Name your most underrated book.
Her Privates We by Frederic Manning

Who would make an ideal literary dining companion?
P B Shelley

What book would you like to see filmed?
The Galapagos Affair by John Treherne

Which book should have a sequel?
Dead Souls by Gogol

Which contemporary author do you most admire?
Anthony Burgess

Which book changed your life?
The Basil Duke Lee Stories by Scott Fitzgerald

September 13 1998

Actor MARTIN JARVIS reveals why he got all steamed up recording Ovid

Which books are you reading now?
City of Nets by Otto Friedrich. Hollywood in the 1940s. Gyles Brandreth's Venice Midnight. Elegant murder mystery involving the theatre. An actor - moi?

Where is your favourite place to read?
On a plane to LA. Eleven hours with no interruptions

Who is your favourite novelist?
Dickens. I've read him since I was 12, acted him and recorded him; he still makes me laugh and cry - sometimes simultaneously

What is the first book you remember reading?
Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. I was always careful to avoid the terrifying illustration of a lurking lion (from As You Like It) on page 32

What is your favourite quotation?
"I like you better than any insect, Joan." William Brown to Joan Parfitt in William and St Valentine. Early attempt by British male to pay a heartfelt compliment

And your favourite play?
Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests. A visiting Martian researching middle-class life on earth would find answers in this brilliant trilogy

What is the most difficult book you have ever read?
Windows 95 for Dummies by Andy Rathbone

What is your funniest book?
Diary of a Somebody by Christopher Matthew

And saddest?
Old editions of Spotlight, the actors' directory

What is the most erotic book you have read?
Ovid's Art of Love. I recorded this recently and it got quite steamy in the studio

Do you have a comfort book you reread?
Any Blandings novel by P G Wodehouse. An idyllic world of sublime comedy. No better place of escape

Name your most underrated book
Riceyman Steps by Arnold Bennett. A psychological masterpiece - profound and horrifying

With which character do you most identify?
John Dyson in Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn. He foolishly believes he is running his own life, but it is his wife who runs it for him. My own situation exactly

What book would you like to see filmed?
Sweet Dreams. Michael Frayn's parody of our world of arts and media transposed to a trendy heaven. Could be marketed as a science-fiction comedy with incredible special effects

Which book should have a sequel?
My own, which I am currently writing for Methuen: Acting Strangely. It's a sort of autobiography, so I certainly hope there'll be more to come

• Martin Jarvis's latest audio recording, Just William 6, is released this week. He will be appearing next week in Lynda La Plante's Supply and Demand on ITV

... and so on and so forth ... :-)