Giles Coren and Sue Perkins My Life in Books

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

With me tonight, what I suppose you could call a TV couple. Comedian and writer Sue Perkins,

winner of the conductor's baton in the BBC series Maestro, and possibly

the only civilian to conduct a full orchestra at the Proms.

I think so, and the way I did it, probably the last.

OK. Alongside her office husband, Times columnist, writer and restaurant critic Giles Coren.

And together, of course, they presented any number of very successful food programmes.

Thank you for joining us.

APPLAUSE

Let's start with childhood pleasures.

-Sue, did your parents read to you?

-All the time, yeah,

both my mum and my dad.

My dad made up stories, which were mainly, now I look back, squirrel-based.

-Sam the Squirrel.

-And you were in Croydon,

so they were Croydon-based squirrel-based?

Yes. They were very specific Croydon squirrel anecdotes.

The squirrel would basically have these adventures, and I remember

being quite a sickly child, I had whooping cough and mumps,

and I was pinned down to my bed with my dad, as I say, essentially rodent-orientated story telling.

And your mother, a working mother?

No, stay-at-home mum.

She just sat with me and thought, "I'm going to make this child love books", and she did.

-Giles, did your father read to you as a child?

-He did,

bits and pieces. He read a book called Theodore And The Talking Mushroom,

about a mushroom that could talk but could only say "querp".

One day Theodore comes to a valley and there's thousands of talking mushrooms, all going "Querp, querp".

And I'd make him do a different voice for every querp.

So he got bored with that quite early.

So your dad was mushroom-based and mine was squirrel-based.

We ought to remind everyone who your dad was, which was Alan Coren,

the very famous Times columnist and editor of Punch,

and of course one of the team captains on Call My Bluff,

-a very competitive team captain on Call My Bluff.

-He was... Oh, there he is.

He was very competitive, it's 0-0 at that stage so he can still smile.

Just remind you of another picture of you.

Very pretty baby, Giles.

Yeah, I think it's probably swapped.

Sue, what's your first choice?

My choice is a book that was published the year I was born -

The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

I love this book.

I read this to my grandson, who's two.

I remember both my parents reading it to me and what I loved about it,

was the fact that, you're learning about the life cycle of an animal,

you're learning new words, you've got these incredible pictures,

you can stick your hands into the hole,

and it's like a meditation on binge-eating as well.

It sort of shows you, you can go so long just eating veg.

You can hold up the holes so people can see.

It's fabulous. He starts with an apple, then a couple of pears, and then he moves on

and it's all very "five a day" and healthy

and he works his way through, and what a lot of fibre he's got in his system.

-He's going to have digestion issues there.

-But then he just goes nuts.

We've got a clip, will that help?

The next day was Sunday again.

The caterpillar ate through one nice green leaf

and after that he felt much better.

Now he wasn't hungry any more, and he wasn't a little caterpillar any more.

He was a big, fat caterpillar.

-How old were you when you read it?

-Probably...

-27.

-Three, four.

I know, I'm still reading it now, but, you know...

-Sue's degree was The Hungry Caterpillar.

-He was...

Easy now, we'll come to you. He was inspired by a hole puncher.

That's what inspired him to write the book.

Suddenly, you're interfacing with literature in a very different way,

it's suddenly a tactile thing.

But, what I love as well is that, you know, this book tells you

you can eat a chocolate cake, an ice cream cone, a pickle, a slice of Swiss cheese, salami, a lollipop,

cherry pie, one sausage, a cupcake, a slice of watermelon and you can still turn out to be a butterfly.

He's saying if you eat a portion the size of a punched hole, you can,

so it's a bit of a Rosemary Conley, isn't it?

We're going to move on.

We will actually come back to childhood books, but we'll fast forward, Giles, for your first book.

You were at boarding school?

I've lived Sue's early childhood and now gone to boarding school!

Did you mind being bundled off to school?

I don't really remember.

I mean, I was allowed home at weekends.

-Let's tell everybody about the book.

-The Great Gatsby was...

Both my parents were quite sort of formative in a book sense,

but my dad was a writer and a big, big reader

and it was his favourite book.

He spent a lot of time in America, he was very into American writers,

and I wanted to read it because it was his favourite book,

but he always said I shouldn't read it until I'd fallen in love.

And as I was boarding

and single sex education, it was either not take his advice

or wait until I had fallen in love with a boy.

This was his favourite book.

The Great Gatsby is J Gatsby, a billionaire who's got his money from nobody quite knows where.

It's narrated by one of his neighbours, so nosey neighbour Nick Carraway, who goes to...

He sees all these dazzling parties happening and wonders why.

One night he gets invited to one of them, and it turns out that

Gatsby's throwing these parties in the desperate hope that a girl he loved years ago before the war

-will one day walk into one of the parties.

-Do you read from a very old copy?

Have you re-read it?

I've read it hundreds of times. I've got lots of copies, I've got my dad's copy.

After he died, at his memorial service,

when I was asked to do a reading, we did it at St Bride's Church

and there was plenty of bible stuff and whatnot, and then I thought, you know,

I'd read from The Great Gatsby, so I read from his copy,

a sort of sad bit at the end which had always made me sort of choke.

And when he was dying, I'd go back and read this page, thinking,

"I'll read this when he's dead, this'll be really moving."

I would choke every time.

Then when it came to it, I was so nervous at having this enormous audience

that I just sort of bundled through it and it was fine. But it seemed to be good closure.

The end of the book is one of the saddest pieces of literature you can ever read.

So this, after Gatsby's died, it's very near the end,

Nick Carraway's sort of, you know, planning to move back east...

and move back west.

So he's standing on his lawn looking out and says,

"I spent my Saturday nights in New York, because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his

"were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter

"faint and incessant from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive.

"One night, I did hear a material car there

"and saw its lights stop at his front steps, but I didn't investigate.

"Probably it was some final guest

"who'd been away at the ends of the Earth and didn't know

that the party was over."

You can tell it doesn't end well.

Sue, your next book's a sort of coming of age book, isn't it?

-Yes.

-How old were you?

I was about 16 when I read this book and it remains my favourite to this day.

And it's the heavyweight, Russian - Dostoevsky -

and it's his masterwork, I think, Crime And Punishment,

which is now, I think, is a byword for pretension.

And I think pretension was possibly the reason that I was driven to pick it up in the first place.

I mean, how did you feel in Croydon walking round with this, did it go down well?

I kept in the inside of my... I was a Goth,

so the great thing about Goths is they've got huge, long coats,

and you can hide any amount of Russian literature in any of the pockets.

-Raskolnikov's basically a Goth, isn't he?

-Yeah, he's morbid and...

Just before we go into who was a Goth in it, ten seconds you've got to give us the plot.

OK. Raskolnikov is a depressed student who is in debt

and decides to murder his landlady who's a pawnbroker,

wealthy pawnbroker, and believes that in doing this terrible act,

it will be worthwhile, because the good that will come

of the money he's got

and the way he disperses it amongst the poor will justify, so the means will justify the end.

And strangely, you know, you're persuaded to love this murderer, aren't you?

Yes, it's... The first book I came across.

Bearing in mind, you know, I loved reading as a kid, but, when you study books,

at least when we were growing up, it's Jane Austen all the way.

It's Hampshire parkland, it's prim women, who have consumption

and fall over and faint and are incredibly passive.

And, there's no real high drama, and there's certainly no psychological intensity.

The women in this one get killed with axes.

Yeah, it's either get killed with an axe or be a prostitute.

But it's dark and it's brooding and there's no skipping and there's no happy ever after,

and I think sometimes when you're exploring the world,

you need to find books like these that sort of describe

the human condition the way that it sometimes is, as bleak and pitiless.

-Just read a little from it.

-This is an extract which

gives a snapshot, a sort of thumbnail of Raskolnikov,

the central character, who's a rather mercurial and manic depressive figure.

"What can I tell you?

"I've know him for a year and a half.

"Sullen, gloomy, arrogant, proud, recently and maybe much earlier,

"insecure and hypochondriac. Magnanimous and kind.

"Doesn't like voicing his feelings and would rather do something cruel than speak his heart out in words.

"At times, however, he's not hypochondriac at all but just inhumanly cold and callous,

"as if there really were two opposite characters in him changing places with one another.

"At times he's terribly taciturn, always in a hurry, always too busy, yet he lies there doing nothing.

"Not given to mockery and not because he lacks sharpness,

"but as if he had no time for such trifles.

"Never hears people out to the end.

"Never interested in what interests everyone else at a given moment,

"sets a terribly high value on himself, and it seems, not without a certain justification."

Thank you, Sue, I think you've sold it

We're going to go from the gloomy urban setting of St Petersburg

to the 1930s for Giles' next choice.

It's very English, the author, Laurie Lee.

Yeah. You know, Cider With Rosie is his most popular thing.

But you haven't chosen that. Let's tell everybody -

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

In fact, it's not a book about the English countryside is it?

He walks out of the English countryside where he grew up,

in the Cotswolds, and walks to London and then on to Spain.

Just sets off with a violin, as it happens, in the year before the Spanish Civil War was breaking out,

and he's a 19-year-old poet seeking his destiny and having fun with gypsy girls.

And from the title onwards, it's obviously lyrical and uplifting and full of hope, isn't it?

Yes. I mean, it is but it's full of hope but it's also,

has a very elegiac tone so, so his previous book was all about,

oh, the England that we have lost, this is also about Spain and Europe

and how it all was just before everything went wrong.

-Did you follow his footsteps?

-I can't bear travelling. I thought I would.

I'm capable of going on holiday, but I'm not capable of just setting off

and seeing what'll happen, because in my experience it's usually nothing.

That is the odd thing, isn't it, that this is a book that you really love?

I know, I thought I'd travel. I was 15, I read this book, I thought, "When I'm his age,

"I will set off barefoot across the Pyrenees with my violin" -

-nobody wants to hear me play the violin.

-OK, read us a bit.

It just sort of... Listen to him, he says,

"It was 1934, I was 19 years old, still soft at the edges but with a confident belief in good fortune.

"I carried a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket,

"a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits and some cheese.

"I was excited, vainglorious, knowing I had far to go, but not as yet how far.

"As I left home that morning, and walked away from the sleeping village,

"it never occurred to me that others had done this before me."

Whereas, it occurred to me,

"Everyone's done that, I'll just stay home and watch telly."

That's what I was going to say, because we have got here your book,

this is Giles' book, Anger Management. This is,

"I've travelled all over the world and have learnt

"only that I hate people who travel most of all.

"With their cameras and their bum bags and their maps and their smattering of the lingo

"and their cultural sensitivity and their Rough Guides

"and even rougher girlfriends.

"You go to their houses, they have carpets on the wall, carpets on the wall, I tell you,

"because they have bought so many bloody carpets that there is no room for them on the floor any more."

Well, exactly, yes.

I turned my incredibly miserable, boring, unadventurous childhood into a book that sold about seven copies.

It's quite a, you know, really excellent, excellent pay-off, I thought.

We'll move on to you being at Cambridge.

Doing a very traditional course, English.

Were you excited to move from Croydon-based to Cambridge-based?

It was very frightening, my first week, actually. It's...

You can't underestimate how much architecture informs you,

and I'd grown up amongst concrete and didn't see grass until I moved to Cambridge,

and suddenly there were the Dreaming Spires and beautiful 15th century buildings

and it was profoundly shocking.

And I felt very dislocated for some time, actually.

I felt grungy and urban, so there was a slight culture clash but one that was probably quite fertile,

looking back, and I did really love my time there.

-Were you disappointed in the books on your course?

-Yeah,

it was a very traditional course at Cambridge.

It didn't really recognise anything published after about 1928,

so if you wanted to study Rushdie, or Amis or McEwan,

there was no-one to really supervise that study, so,

it was very, very traditional.

There was a lot of Anglo Saxon and Norse and Celtic and it's amazing,

you speak Norse to people in the supermarkets, they've no idea what you're talking about(!)

-Out of it came your next choice?

-It did.

Very different to anything you were being taught at the time -

Nights At The Circus, Angela Carter.

Angela Carter, I think, is explosive and it's sexy

and it's magic realism at its best. It's fairytale, it's post-feminism,

it's so incalculably rich and extraordinary to get hold of.

-Tell us about the heroine.

-Fevvers.

So Fevvers was born, the mythology of Fevvers is that she's hatched from an egg, and she's an odd child

with sort of lumps here, sort of a bit like a double hunchback,

and as she hits adolescence, suddenly these lumps turn into

these incredible wings, so immediately she's, she's an oddity, and the story...

A bit like The Hungry Caterpillar, then.

Yes, all about metamorphosis.

You could find her slightly annoying, the heroine of this, Sue.

Yeah. She's brash and she's not an apologist.

-I don't know if there's something about that you might recognise.

-Or you! She's...

Girls, girls, girls, come on, let's just talk about the books.

-She's an exhibitionist.

-She is an exhibitionist.

-Unashamedly.

-Totally, and there is something irritating about that personality that goes,

"Look at me, look at me, I can fly."

And the focus and the energy is always on her, but...

-Can she actually fly?

-Well, this runs through the book.

It's not that I haven't read it, but...

-She has a very big account of herself, doesn't she?

-Totally,

totally a big account of herself, but that's how she lures her menfolk in.

As Giles hasn't read any of this, shall we give him a taste?

Why not?

"She rose up on tiptoe and slowly twirled around giving the spectators a comprehensive view of her back.

"Seeing is believing.

"Then she spread out her superb heavy arms in a backwards gesture of benediction,

"and as she did so, her wings spread too.

"Polychromatic unfolding fully six feet across, spread of an eagle, a condor, an albatross fed to excess

"on the same diet that makes flamingos pink."

It's about somebody who is constantly in the process of

fictionalising their life and, you know, every moment she's changeable.

And, you know, if you want to get political about it,

it's an allegory on why women can only shine in certain environments and if they're unusual,

how they're almost put in cages or they have to have labels put on them

or they're freaks of nature.

And I think she was writing at a time in the '80s where

of course you can't discount that kind of feminist strand,

but ANY book is boring if you see it as a feminist book.

This is a great book because it's bouncing with life,

it's got incredible imagery and she's an extraordinary writer.

Because you felt so different at Cambridge,

-it was...

-I think there's an element of that and of course there's...

you know, my personality is, very, very customary for a sort of personality on television -

there's one half of me that's unspeakably shy and can't look at people and stammers and is fretful,

and there's the other part that is the most appalling narcissistic show-off,

and it's reconciling those two, and that's what this book explores.

It's how you're one thing in public and another in private.

So, while you were at Cambridge, you're at Oxford.

I was a nerdy little swot with no notion of self definition.

You read this just after you left -

Moby Dick, Herman Melville.

I know, it's the saddest thing, the day after finals,

after three years of really working reasonably hard,

and everyone sort of went crazy, I started reading books that hadn't been on the course.

The Americans go on and on about trying to write the great American novel -

in fact they did it 150 years ago, better than anything ever written in English,

-any Dickens rubbish or Thackeray.

-Will you give us a thumbnail sketch?

A bloke goes out to catch a fish and nearly manages it and fails.

It's only 800 pages, so...

-It's basically Jaws, essentially.

-Yes, exactly.

-It's Jaws.

-It's Jaws.

Maybe the clip will help.

The birds!

He rises!

In!

In and after him!

HE SCREAMS

I think they've got slightly better at doing whales since then.

Yes. I think they probably have.

I mean, funnily enough, that is the only thing that happens in the book.

I'm sort of suspicious of plots and find plots boring,

I like books when nothing much happens,

and really, the whole book is build up to that moment.

Your next book choices are more contemporary,

Sue, appropriately, yours is called The Queen Of Whale Cay,

though it's nothing to do with whales.

It's not a very well-known book.

Can you give us a brief description?

Basically, Queen Of Whale Cay is a woman called Jo Carstairs, the fastest woman on water.

And she's basically a playboy, except she's female.

She's loaded... to the point of madness.

She buys and island, she runs it as her own fiefdom.

She looks like most people who taught me Latin at school, actually.

The thing is,

people were very, as you would be, when you first met her,

because she was so rumbustuous and strong and would trek across

mango groves and then sort of throttle an animal

and then have a bite on a sandwich and throttle something else.

But actually, everyone slowly came to really love her and...so eccentric.

-She had a puppet that she spoke to and communicated with.

-She slept with Marlene Dietrich.

She did, and apparently Dietrich was so in love with her, it broke her heart.

She's like Ernest Hemingway, she's like a female Hemingway.

But you never get to hear about these people, I think that's why I love this book so much,

because it's these characters from the margins, and Kate Summerscale is a fantastic writer.

-It would make a great movie.

-Yeah, you've read this, did you like it?

Yeah, I think it's terrific, I was very glad to be introduced to it.

It's a real gift to be given something like that,

because you'd never think of buying it, but when you read it... You talk about Gatsby,

I mean, the same sort of time period and this just basically swings

the microscope of history round and gives you an alternate story, and it's fascinating.

Giles, your next choice,

-Everything Is Illuminated.

-Yes.

By Jonathan Safran Foer, who's a young American writer,

much younger than me, even younger than that when he published that

-and younger still when he wrote it, he was 19 or 20.

-And you feature,

or your words feature on the cover, "A work of genius, a new kind of novel,

"after it things will never be the same again, it will blow you away."

And they haven't actually put my name there because people wouldn't

think it was true if it had my name after it, so they've just put The Times.

I had never heard of him, no-one had heard of him in this country. He hadn't been published here.

He'd published the odd short story in New York.

My publisher, when I was writing my own first novel, my publisher said,

"You might like this, by this young American kid", sent it to me cold,

I read it and I was halfway through my novel, and I realised it was

-just the novel I wish I could write.

-Did it put you off?

-Yeah,

I was writing a pale imitation of that book, even before I'd read it.

-Tell us about it.

-I think at the time he was, he was on a creative writing course,

having graduated from whatever university it was,

and he wanted to do, he wanted to go back and investigate his family -

he was a Jewish emigre - and investigate what had happened to his grandparents in the Ukraine

in the years leading up to the Holocaust.

And so he went back to try and find the shtetl

where they'd come from, and things didn't go very well.

So he ended up sort of blowing up the project and turning it into a novel.

Did it encourage you to look at your Jewish ancestry?

Yes. It did, or it made me, I was doing that when I was writing my novel.

I wanted to write about... Because the people who were around then,

people who were victims of persecution, that kind of literature all exists.

Then there was the second generation, the children of the Holocaust survivors,

but then there's the children of the children - he was someone

whose grandparents' generation, like mine, were affected by it.

And I tried, and I wrote this book which was fine,

it's just this kid was doing it so much better.

You can't JUST write about Jewishness and the Holocaust and the war,

you have to do it really, really well.

-Were you proud about that...

-Quote on the jacket?

Yeah, I mean, when I started off in journalism, I wrote book reviews,

that's what I did in the early '90s. You write book reviews with the sole aim of getting on the jacket.

Whether you read the book or not, it doesn't matter how good the piece is,

you write in sentences, you know, "A rare example of lyrical beauty in modern English fiction."

Or you say, "By turns, harrowing and laugh out loud funny, it kept me..."

-Always, "It kept me awake all night, or "Made me laugh out loud on the tube."

-Let me stop you.

Sue, will you read another bit from Anger Management by Giles Coren?

-By Giles Coren?

-Yeah.

Where on Earth did you find a copy? It's amazing!

-This is on book reviews on the back of...

-Yes.

-..jackets of books.

-From a chapter entitled People Who Think They Have A Book In Them.

"Think of when you're looking at the back of a book wondering whether to buy it or not.

"Those little recommendations from Nick Hornby and Salman Rushdie and Kathy Lette.

"They're always the same - 'A rattling good read.'

"'I couldn't put it down.' 'It kept me awake till four in the morning.'"

"What does it matter that a piece of creative writing kept Kathy Lette awake till four in the morning?

-"A dodgy car alarm would do that."

-LAUGHTER

-So it's a complete contradiction.

-You're saying I'm a hypocrite? Yes. Absolutely. Anything to get in print.

Yeah, no, I mean it was, it is true, it is, you know,

the book blurb is one of the great phantasms. You must get asked a bit,

just to give someone a quote for the front of their book.

And you get sent a book by someone who's maybe a friend and it's absolutely rubbish.

Made me want to cry, laugh, urinate, explode, and then you...

Exactly. My father, my dad was sent one by his friend Jeffrey Archer once,

it was Jeffrey Archer's publisher, my dad and he were great mates always remained great mates.

But Archer's writing wasn't up my dad's street.

-So he gave him the quote, "Fans of Jeffrey Archer will not be disappointed."

-Yeah.

-LAUGHTER

-It is a problem, isn't it? I always find, "A jaw-dropping account"

-is a good description.

-Very good.

-We've had childhood books,

ones you've enjoyed in adolescence,

we're going to move on to guilty pleasures. Sue, what'll it be?

Well, I've picked The Moonstone

by Wilkie Collins simply because it acts as a turning point for me

into the truly guilty pleasures.

So The Moonstone is a very famous work of detective fiction.

It features arguably the first detective we have in British writing

and it's got all the sensationalist accoutrements you get in a great thriller.

You've got the locked room, you've got the missing diamond,

you've got the heiress, you've got the gentleman detective,

you've got the procedural, slightly bumbling kind of Scotland Yard guy,

you've got a group of Indian jugglers who may or may not be suspicious.

They might just be jugglers, or, they could be sent by a slightly more sinister force.

At what stage in your life did you realise that Wilkie Collins was a man?

I think when I read the... "'Wilkie Collins is the finest man writing today,' Giles Coren."

-I thought Wilkie Collins was a woman until about...

-Did you?

Until I was about 38, yeah, I didn't read it because I thought it was another chick...

-It's not really a Christian name whichever way you slice it.

-Not really, is it? Wilkie?

-No.

-So, crime.

-So crime.

-Light crime.

And the thing is, is that, I mean, Wilkie will now turn in his grave,

but Wilkie's directly responsible for Agatha Christie, who basically takes the locked room,

takes all those kind of tropes of detective fiction and uses them

-in every single book.

-Meanwhile,

for YOUR guilty pleasure, you go back to childhood?

I've got these Asterix books here and I've read them all

-hundreds of times.

-They're comics.

They're French. They're very much into their bandes dessinees.

They don't have a literary heritage like ours,

-they've got no Shakespeare, no Dickens...

-Er, Hugo, Balzac, Zola.

OK, yeah, but basically it's comics and restaurant menus, isn't it, for the French?

-LAUGHTER

-And, they have taken it to

a very high level with Asterix, which are much better in translation

-into English than they are in French.

-They're quite Python-esque, aren't they?

Yes, I mean, in that anachronism is the big joke, really.

Sue's leafing here through some which I happen to have in Flemish because...

Of course you do. Why do you have them in Flemish?

They have actually been published in about 45 languages.

-I've got them all.

-They're phenomenally successful.

I've got Asterix in...

THEY READ OUT TITLES IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES

Everyone'll be changing channels.

-These are boys' books, aren't they?

-I'm hoping not.

-They're not girls' books, are they?

They're not girls'... I was more of a Tintin, Tintin was more girly.

Tintin is basically your Queen Of Whale Cay, though - 1930s,

racing around in sports cars and sort of plus fours...

Plus dogs as well, which is always good.

Sue, what do your book choices say about you, if you look at them?

If I look at them I'd say... what do they say?

Let me line them up and I can sort of go in...

I think they probably say, binge eating,

quasi depressive...show-off...

who would love to own her own island - although I'm not a fan of cross dressing, personally -

and what was the other one of mine?

Will probably end up getting, you know, I don't know, bumped off by an American heiress.

Giles, what do yours say?

Pre-literate moron trying to pretend he's read Moby Dick.

Fabulous.

Before we go, if you had to choose just one book, what would it be, Sue?

I'm torn, and this is, I don't know, I'm torn between

Crime And Punishment and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

And this is the book that you're going to recommend, to Giles, to viewers, to the audience.

-I'm going to assume that everybody has read.

-Oh, goody! Oh, you're not going to choose that?

You want me to, don't you?

-I love it!

-You want me to say

the book I choose above all others... Well, because it got me to read and...

-And that's most important.

-But to keep you reading.

-OK, right.

-I'm hedging my bets.

-So The Hungry Caterpillar and Crime And Punishment.

Could you stick to one, Giles?

-I'd love to be able to tell people to read Asterix...

-HE SPEAKS IN FLEMISH

..but I suspect that their Flemish isn't as strong as mine.

So, so Moby Dick. I think Moby Dick gets a very bad reputation.

People think of it as long and difficult, but it's long and easy,

and I would like other people to read it because no-one ever believes

that I have, because it's the book people pretend to have read,

and they really should have done.

Sue, Giles, thank you very much indeed. And just to remind everyone,

more details on the book series on the website.

Please join me again tomorrow, same time, same place

for more stories of lives and books.

APPLAUSE

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd