Robert Harris and Trinny Woodall My Life in Books

APPLAUSE

Welcome to My Life In Books, a chance for my guests to share their favourite reads.

Joining me tonight, best selling author Robert Harris.

He's turned his interest in politics and modern history into a publishing sensation.

His book Fatherland, which imagines life if Hitler had won the war, has sold more than three million copies.

Alongside him, Trinny Woodall, one half of the team that told

a generation what to wear and, just as importantly, what not to wear.

I hope she approves of Robert's jacket and my dress.

If she doesn't, I'm sure she'll make it clear immediately.

Thank you both for joining me.

APPLAUSE

Let's begin with childhood reads, Robert, tell us a bit about your childhood.

Well, I was born in Nottingham in 1957 and my father

was a printer, and I think I got a love of reading and writing right from the start with printer's ink

in the veins, and books are very important to me.

Libraries are very important to me.

Obviously there were only two television channels, both

in black and white, no computers or anything like that, and books were a main source of entertainment.

Did your parents read to you?

I can't really remember them reading to me, no. But I learnt to read quite early, I think I was reading

a bit before I started school and you know it became... It was just terribly important.

Your first choice is Just William

by Richmal Crompton. How old were you when you were reading this?

Well, I know that I was seven because actually almost my oldest possession

that I have is this book which gives my name and address,

62 Violet Road, Carlton, Notts,

in 1964, class eight, so I know I must have been seven.

Do you think children still like writing their name and address

in the front of books? It's certainly a thing of the past.

I hope they do because one used to write, "Robert Harris,

"England, Europe, the world, the solar system, the universe." Yeah, I'm sure they still do, surely.

Can you give us a summary of the plot?

This is the very first Just William, I think, I've got here.

Well, there were so many of them, and one of

the things that's great about it is that Richmal Crompton, I never knew

it was a woman that wrote them.

It's quite clever because I think boys might have an antipathy to books written by women,

and JK Rowling, you didn't know was a woman and Richmal Crompton, I thought was a man.

The best books took place in the '30s and during the war,

when William and his gang of Outlaws would accost a nun,

thinking she was a parachuted German spy, for instance.

They were all just very clever stories and they fall into that wonderful category of books that can

be enjoyed by a child, a seven-year-old, or someone grown up,

because they're so well written and funny.

Can you read us a passage?

This is a story called William Gets A Scoop.

And he and his friends, the Outlaws, have decided they'll entertain themselves by

creating a newspaper.

"What'll we have?" said Ginger. "In the newspaper, I mean."

"They have news in newspapers", said Henry, simply.

"There isn't any news", said Ginger. "My father's always saying there isn't any news.

"Whenever my mother asks him at breakfast what news

"there is in his newspaper, he always says there isn't any."

"We can invent news, can't we?" said William.

"I bet that's what real ones do, invent it if there isn't any."

"It's going to be jolly difficult inventing news", said Douglas. "And there's laws against it.

"My aunt once knew someone that was 'ad up by the police

"for saying something about someone else that wasn't true.

"It frightened her so much she got an awful disease called jaundice and turned yellow all over."

"That's right" said William. "Start making objections, soon as ever

"I get a good idea, you all start making objections."

And it's just, you know, it's great fun.

It's a great adult joke as well as being a good joke for children.

Trinny, your childhood, it was a much travelled childhood, wasn't it?

It was, I grew up mainly out of England, in France

and Germany and Switzerland, so I went to boarding school.

-From an early age?

-From an early age.

-How early?

-From six and a half.

Until 16. And I remember, actually, I didn't know how to read

at my first boarding school, it took me a long time.

And then when I did I really got into books, but I did have a favourite author for a while.

You did, your very favourite author, Trinny, was Barbara Cartland.

This one's The Love Pirate, but does it matter which one?

They just go blindly from one to the next.

-They'll all end, this is how they all end.

-Give us a thumbnail sketch.

It could be any of them. Lord Sayer, he's probably the bad one or the good one,

or the prince could be the bad one, and she's got no money and she's sort of impoverished.

But she's got a good background and some big drama happens

he has to rescue her from, and then she suddenly realises she loves him.

And Barbara Cartland never talks about sex,

but see which bit of this thing you think is the sex bit, OK?

"I love you", Bertilla answered.

"I love you until I feel as if I were made of love,

"that everything I am is yours, completely and absolutely."

"That is what I want", he answered.

Then he pulled her into his arms and he kissed her until the garden seemed to whirl around her.

The colours, the scent of the flowers and the flight of the butterflies seemed to mingle with

the love which filled her heart and mind until she became a part of him and they were indivisible.

That's when they had it off.

There was only love, a love that was just part of divine, sacred and unspoilt, true and

faithful between one man and one woman, now and for all eternity.

"I love you. God, how much I love you", Lord Sayer said hoarsely. Sorry, should have said,

-IN DEEP VOICE:

-"I love you. God, how much I love you."

Faintly, against his lips, Bertilla

echoed his words, "I love you, I love you with all, all of me." And that's it.

I had about 70 of her books, you know, and

then I created this sort of lending library for people, and I had this very sweet girl from Nigeria,

there were lots of people from lots of different countries at the school,

so their first introduction to English literature was Barbara Cartland, via me.

You went into retail early, then?

I went into retail early, but when I think about it now, when I was asked for my choices,

I thought to myself, "All these books are about makeovers."

Ironically. They're about, you know, somebody born, kind of with, this...

Always the life is a terrible life, or they're an orphan or whatever,

and then there's the dangerous, you know,

naughty duke who wants to kind of ravish them and then there's the good lord who wants to get them.

And she hates him and he hates her and she thinks he hates her even more, and they end up together.

You and Susannah did a wonderful spoof at the end of last year,

which was online and then shown on Channel Four, here's a clip of the two of you sending yourselves up.

Without any lucrative contracts or representation,

Trinny and Susannah have decided to find themselves a new agent...

What do you reckon then, nice bit of shmutter, innit?

Two buttons may be better than three just cos of your...

Because you're kind of heavy set at the top...

See, there you go, straight away.

-What?

-Your problem. You're too honest.

You wanna look at that Chinese woman, the tall one with the bins.

-Gok Wan.

-Wok.

-And he's a man, yeah...

-He's a what?

-He's a man.

-Doesn't matter.

He was so good, the agent.

Robert, your next book...

-By way of a change!

-By way of a change.

It's a formidable book. It's The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich

by William L Shirer. How old were you when you bought this?

-Well...

-Or did you buy it?

This sounds really sick, I mean, when Trinny was reading Barbara Cartland,

and the contrast between the male and female species, I came by,

we went on a school exchange to Paris and I bought this at the airport, and I suppose it was the

first sort of big proper history book that I bought and read, and it had a great impact on me and from then on

I was very interested in the war and in Germany, Nazi Germany in particular.

Tell us about what is in the book.

Well, this is an amazing book because Shirer was the CBS radio correspondent in Berlin,

late '30s, and stayed there until Germany came into the war in 1941,

so he was actually the accredited war correspondent who saw what was happening. And after the war

he attended Nuremburg, he got the trial papers and documents and he turned them into this enormous book.

A combination of eyewitness testimony and the actual historical record.

And it is a good book and it's still widely read and considered quite good for its time.

And there's one particular part in it which has always stuck in my mind.

Shirer travelled to France when the French surrendered, and he goes into the wood

when Hitler has arranged for... The dining car in which the Armistice was

signed at the end of the First World War is brought out and the French are

made to sign the surrender in 1940 there. And Shirer is there, and he describes it.

"I observed his face. It was grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge.

"There was also in it, as in his springy step,

"a note of the triumphant conqueror, the defier of the world.

"There was something else, a sort of scornful inner joy at being present

"at this great reversal of fate, a reversal he himself had wrought."

It describes him, you know, going up the steps to take the surrender

and executing this little dance and so on,

and it brought history vividly alive to me, and when I wrote my novel Fatherland, actually I

put in it a correspondent from Germany, from America, who's working in Berlin.

What came first, the choice of book and then the subjects that you went on to write about

or were you already thinking about that period of history?

I think I must already have been thinking because there was such a cultural domination, understandably.

I mean, in the 1960s we were only 15 years after the end of the war.

Which is what, for us to go back to sort of 1996 or something? You know, it's no time at all.

And so the comics were full of, you know, commandos and war stories,

television, documentaries,

everything was the war, Alistair MacLean and so on.

So I think that this was, this came out of an interest which was already then around, and then I got more and

more interested, and then of course one realised that the war

was much more complicated than I'd been brought up on.

The thread of my life really,

has been understanding this great event which took place just before I was born.

Did you know you wanted to be a writer by then?

Yes, I started to want to be a writer when I was about eight,

when I started on Just William, and I never really deviated from that.

Well, you sort of did, because you went into television as your first job.

Well, that was just to earn some money, quite frankly.

We've got a clip of you.

Oh no, you haven't? I know what clip it's going to be as well!

'This is what it's like being on the campaign trail'

with the Prime Minister in 1983.

It's as far removed from traditional campaigning

as it's possible to imagine.

There aren't many voters in sight.

What there are are hundreds of members of the media, who swarm around the Prime Minister

follow her every move, and the idea from the Conservatives' point of view is to get the best possible exposure

on the TV news that evening.

-What do you think of his haircut?

-I just love Maggie Thatcher's face!

Trinny, your next choice, you're now 22 and you have your first job,

and it's Perfume by Patrick Suskind.

Why this book?

I went to Paris to do research on a fragrance and I worked with this old perfume house called Caron.

And the man who ran it was called Sandy Bertrand and he used to be the editor of Vogue,

kind of incredibly glamorous Frenchman, and I was very insecure there

and everyone was very sophisticated, and the French are quite intimidating

and unless you spoke perfect French they won't speak to you in English,

so I'd speak French with the Algerian taxi drivers.

And Sandy said to me, "You need to really understand the essence of

"the nose of perfume so you must read this book." And it just came out then.

And I read the book in my sort of lonely little

hotel room that I stayed in when I went over, and I found it such an evocative book about smell.

Can you give us a brief summary of the story?

The protagonist is a man who grows up in Paris in the 18th century, in the slums,

and when he's very young he's in an orphanage, his mother's abandoned him,

and he has an incredible nose and he smells all the different woods in the fire.

He teams up with a perfumier, and this guy by way of his nose

creates the most amazing fragrance for him so he becomes feted, but then he becomes

obsessed with the smell of women before they lose their virginity and he becomes a murderer, and he

goes round France murdering these women for the smell and creating this ultimate fragrance.

What happened to the perfume you were going to come up with?

It sort of never happened, we just dabbled for ages and I met

the nose man and he sits with this row of about 70 different,

or 80 different smells and it was so interesting and I do have, you know, my...

All my senses are led and my...

I have a very bad memory, but smell is my strongest connection with the past.

Robert, your next book is George Orwell's 1984. Why this choice?

This is just a wonderful book.

It's about a loner in a totalitarian state, it's about an individual pitted against power.

And what it is, supremely, Orwell was a brilliant journalist,

but if he'd written this as he could have written it,

as a non-fiction book just about power and the way it operates and so on,

it might have been very good, but it would have been totally forgotten.

Because he transformed his ideas into a story and characters and he created a world, he made something which,

a work of the imagination, which transcended its time.

I think it's probably the most important novel ever written.

Not the best novel ever written, but the most important because after it things were never quite the same.

You've brought your own copy in here.

Yes, well, I've had many copies of 1984 over the years, but after I'd written Fatherland,

I was then struggling to write my second novel and Jeremy Paxman,

who's an old journalistic friend of mine,

he gave me this as a present, which is the facsimile edition of 1984,

and he said, "You think you're having problems writing Enigma?

"Look at what Orwell had to go through writing 1984."

I don't know whether you can see it, but it just shows the enormous amount of crossings-out

and rewritings that Orwell did.

And it's the whole manuscript, reproduced,

and you just see the way that Orwell, who was dying by this point of TB,

rewrote the book and the struggle that he had to get it as he wanted it.

And it's a very moving, powerful document, I think.

For me, it's very interesting because it shows you how...

The perfection of what you get between covers.

There's a lot of sweat and misery gone into getting there.

-Do you rework your books a lot?

-Yes, as I write, all the time.

I probably rewrite passages ten or 20 times at least, to try and get them right.

And it's like, you know, it's like a tuning fork or something.

You get as close as you can to what is in your head.

Trinny, do you reread favourite books?

I do, cos what I tend to do, I have a lot of books at home. I have, you know, in my kitchen,

in my sitting room, upstairs in my office,

I have bookcase after bookcase and I lend books to friends.

Do you still keep a note like you did at school?

No, but what I do is I immediately remember to buy it again.

Cos I kind of love it, but they're like old friends so I do them, I sort of categorise my books

cos I kind of like, like you, I like my Second World War section, that's a big section,

then the classics section, then stuff about fashion etc,

so it's kind of whole different things and I hate, you know,

if I've lent a favourite book, to not have it there still.

It's a map of your life, I think, a bookshelf,

it shows your intellectual life, which you can have if you've got the books and you keep them.

Trinny, this next book you read in your 20s.

And you'd come out of a treatment centre for drug and drink addiction.

Yes!

Not a self-help book.

-Not a self-help book at all.

-But The Count Of Monte Cristo

by Alexandre Dumas, tell us about this choice.

It was the first classic book I read that I hadn't been obliged to read for school.

This is a book of somebody really juggling with the concept of revenge.

They're really hard done by, they're really screwed, they're sent to prison, they think they'll

be there for life, they have an opportunity to escape and they escape, and it's

how they decide to deal with all the people who screwed up their life.

They don't turn the other cheek.

No, they sure don't, darling. You and I would both know about that.

So I'm just going to...

Revealing my age, and get my glasses on.

OK.

"The natural repugnance to commit such a crime prevented

"its idea from occurring to you, and so it ever is with all simple

"and allowable things, our natural instincts keep us from deviating from the strict line of duty.

"The tiger, whose nature teaches him to delight in shedding blood, needs

"but his sense of smell to know when his prey is within his reach and by following this instinct he is unable

"to measure the force necessary to enable him to spring on his victim.

"But man, on the contrary, loathes the idea of blood.

"It's not just the law of social life that inspires him with a shrinking dread of taking life,

"his natural construction and physiological formation."

It's kind of that struggle with, "How far am I going to go?"

Can you cope with sad endings and sad books?

I think books do need sometimes sad endings cos they need you to think.

I like to read a book to make me either think more about my life, think, you know, how...

I sometimes do read a book to escape, and if it's powerful enough, it does that for you.

Certainly a sad ending on your next choice, Robert.

It's The End of The Affair by Graham Greene.

This is very much the influence of your father showing here, isn't it?

Yes, he left school when he was 14, he didn't pass the 11-plus and he became self taught.

And he read Greene with absolute devotion,

he read everything that Greene ever wrote, and

that was quite an influence on me, the notion that you could,

as Greene does, he writes brilliant stories

and his characters are very strong and they are entertaining books.

And they reach a large audience. But they also have high literary quality, and The End Of The Affair

is a superb example of that.

It's a very complicated story in the way it's told, it flashes back

and forth, it's an account of a love affair that starts just before war

is declared in 1939 and ends in a V-bomb attack in June 1944.

It's the writer looking back and trying to reconstruct this,

and it's a very haunting book and powerful image of a doomed love affair,

and it's dedicated, the book is dedicated "To C".

And "C" was Catherine Woolston with whom Greene himself had a...

-Long affair.

-..long and quite sad affair.

There's slightly too much Roman Catholic theology in it for my taste, I have to say.

-Also, the Catholicism in this one is quite implausible, really.

-It is very implausible.

The notion that she's a sort of saint or that she stops the affair because...

Basically what happens is,

they're in bed together, there's a V-1 bomb comes down and she gets down on her knees and prays,

"Let him not be dead", her lover. "And if he's not dead, God, then I promise I'll never see him again."

And then he walks through the door and her diary's included and she, she's got what she wanted

but at the price of never seeing him again, and she hates God as a result.

It is very heavy Catholic guilt, but it's wonderful. I think he's a terrific writer.

I don't think anyone has come close to replacing him in British literature since he died.

Trinny, your next book choice is Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close,

Jonathan Safran Foer. Tell us about this.

It's a very sweet book

that is about a little boy who's eight

and his father was killed in the 9/11 World Trade Center, and he,

at the very beginning of the book, is... There's some messages, and you know,

I heard lots of messages on the TV of people who were dying and called their loved ones.

And his father says, "Hi, I'm OK, I'm in the thing, I'm OK." Then two minutes later something else,

then ten minutes later something else.

And then, "I'm going to die, I'm not going to get out." And he hears it first

and he decides to hide it from his mother, so he changes the tape and his mother, at the same time,

has got the call saying that he's died,

and she decides not to tell her son exactly how it's happened

so he's armed with this knowledge of what really happened and she's trying to hide the truth.

It's just, you know, this little boy is so intelligent and so worldly

for an eight-year-old, and he finds a little key in his father's dressing room

and he thinks this key, which is in a little envelope with the word "Black" written on it,

is going to be the answer to finding out about his father.

He goes on this quest around New York and he meets 385 people by the name of Black.

He finds people along the way to help, he's only eight, he skips school...

Where were you when you read it?

I was in New York, actually. Well, I was in the States making a show and...

I don't know, it's just certain times when you think of where you were when you heard.

I was in Guildford in a department store making a What Not to Wear programme when 9/11 happened,

and I remember nobody knew what really happened and it was such a...

Not a bigger deal than it was,

but for a second we thought an atom bomb had gone off in America or something so it's just...

It puts it in perspective of one small boy's life.

Now we've heard about your childhood reads, the books that have influenced you later on.

We're going to move on to books that you've simply enjoyed.

Guilty pleasures perhaps, beach reads.

For you, Robert, it's Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim.

-Yeah.

-And of course you've got a nice... Is it a first edition?

-No it's not, it's just an old, it cost me 70p.

-Tell us about it.

Well, it's a great book.

It's one of those books that I read every four or five years, I suppose, so I must have read it five or six

times, at least, and it makes me laugh and it's just

a very cheerful, heart-warming story,

and it's a great attack on pomposity and it's very funny about academic life.

-He's a young university...

-He's a young university lecturer who's lumbered

with a terribly neurotic girlfriend,

who he eventually manages to dump in favour of this sort of shimmering beauty.

And the epigraph is,

"Oh, Lucky Jim, how I envy him. Oh, Lucky Jim, how I envy him."

And there are many scrapes and adventures in it, and, I don't know,

it's just, it's just immensely cheerful, you know.

I do think that humour... This is a dated book, it's set in the '50s, but the humour in it

still... It's still very relevant and there's a wonderful passage here,

probably the most famous passage in the book, a description of

waking up with a hangover, which is as fresh today as it was when Amis wrote it in the 1950s.

-Shall I read it?

-Yes, please.

We've all been here, I think, or most of us.

"Dixon was alive again.

"Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.

"Not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary forcible ejection.

"He lay sprawled, too wicked to move,

"spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.

"The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did.

"He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.

"A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse.

"His mouth had been used as a latrine

"by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.

"During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross country run

"and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad."

-LAUGHTER

-Have you gone on reading Amis?

I did read most of Kingsley Amis, yes, I think. I didn't

read the last couple but I did, and I find him a very interesting writer.

More interesting, dare I say it, than his son, because he experimented with lots of different forms.

He was certainly, of course, misogynistic and his views were quite repugnant to me in many ways,

and in fact his last published piece as a writer was a bad review of my second novel, Enigma,

in The Spectator. He promptly dropped dead after he'd written it!

But for all that, I willingly forgive him because I think he was such a good writer and so funny.

Very funny. Very funny. You have been entirely original, Trinny, for your guilty pleasure.

It's The New York Times Crossword Puzzle Dictionary.

Why is this?

Well, I find...

I'm travelling a lot at the moment, I'm making a show in about ten countries around the world

and you can never get one newspaper.

So the only newspaper I get is the Herald Tribune,

which is a relatively well-read paper, but it's excerpts from the New York Times.

And it will always have the crossword in it, so, wherever I am, I know that I can do it.

And it's a kind of weird crossword and it's not a cryptic crossword,

but it's a sort of lateral thinking, so there'll always be a theme of the week and you have to work it out.

-This book...

-OK, show us how it works.

Cos it's not a normal dictionary, is it?

It's not a normal dictionary, so let's say I am looking at it now, have to put my glasses on again.

Looking at it now, so I'm trying to find one which would be...

OK, "very", all right so "very" could mean many different things.

Four letters, "very". OK, so I look up "very".

Have you got it ready, Robert, the answer?

-I've no idea.

-Four letters, "very", come on, Robert.

I can't do crosswords, especially cryptic ones.

It's not cryptic, Robert. OK, "very".

I'm sitting it out.

No, you're not, you're taking part, it's all about taking part.

Let's see, "very". OK, so what it would do is, it will

have from a two-letter word to an 11-letter word, the words for "very", so it starts with "so"

and it ends with "absolutely".

-But we want four.

-We want four, so four could be "braw", which is really American, "It's braw good."

Dead, fell, fool, just, main, much, pure, rare, real, same,

-self, such, tres, well, asai.

-I'd question half of those.

I'd question asai as well, but the thing is, once I know the answer to something else, OK,

I would then go down and think, "It's going to be that one because that's got an A in it."

But it keeps me going. It stops the Alzheimer's.

Thank you, Trinny. Robert, if you had to choose just one of your books to recommend, which would it be?

Oh, heavens. That's very hard.

Do you know, I think for sentimental reasons I'd say Just William.

I just think that they are brilliant and anyone can enjoy them and their children too, and I think a book

-where a whole family can meet without being too sentimental about it, is a great thing.

-Trinny?

The Count of Monte Cristo because I think most ages can read it.

And, Trinny, what do you think your choices say about you?

Eclectic.

Very much about the mood I'm in at the stage in my life.

Robert, what is interesting about your choice is, I work it out,

they only span from about 1940 to about 1956.

Yes, it's rather frightening, actually, now you point it out.

I was born out of my time, I think, and I've been thrashing about ever since.

I do find that period, the war period, the most interesting.

I mean, war is awful of course, but nevertheless

it does call forth qualities from that generation that I don't think we can even dream of, actually.

Well, there we are. Thank you to Robert Harris and Trinny Woodall for joining me on My Life In Books.

APPLAUSE

That's the end of the show and, alas, the end of the series.

Details of all the books we've discussed are on the website...

Thank you for watching.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd