Editor-in-chief of The Lady, judge of the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year Award, author of Shire Hell and a keen skier, Rachel Johnson is this week’s Shelf Lifer. She has eminently sensible suggestions for the English curriculum, reveals the guilty literary secrets of the Johnson dynasty and tells us about the downside of having a famous brother.
1) What are you reading at the moment?
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright, Frances Osborne’s Park Lane, just finished Philip Gould’s When I Die. Off the record – Fifty Shades of Grey.
2) As a child, what did you read under the covers?
Enid Blyton. My parents wouldn’t let me read it which was hypocritical of them as when I stole bootleg copies from my Grandparents’ house on Exmoor, they all had my father’s name in them. Even the Malory Towers and St Clares series.
3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?
I think I cried in Birdsong, and I definitely cried three times in Wait For Me by Debo Devonshire, when everyone died and she was so stiff upper lip about it in print. That completely broke me.
4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose?
French-English Larousse…Proust…and Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
5) Which literary character would you most like to sleep with?
James Bond.
6) If you could write a self-help book, what would you call it?
‘Don’t Talk about It, Do it.’ More of a self-hinder book, probably.
7) Michael Gove has asked you to rewrite the GCSE English Literature syllabus. Which book, which play, and which poem would you make compulsory reading?
George Orwell’s Collected Essays. King Lear. The Wasteland by TS Eliot.
8) Which party from literature would you most like to have attended?
The Duchess of Richmond’s Ball on the eve of Waterloo.
9) What would you title your memoirs?
‘Though I Say So Myself’.
10) Which literary character do you dream of playing?
Becky Sharp.
11) What book would you give to a lover?
Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz.
12) Spying Mein Kampf or Dan Brown on someone’s bookshelf can spell havoc for a friendship. What’s your literary deal breaker?
Brilliant question. I have a soft spot for Wilbur Smith and Jeffrey Archer (Master Storytellers both!) but I’m inclusive. What would cause a real shudder of revulsion would be no books at all…I’m always slightly freaked when I see biographies of Boris on the shelf, having said that, as there are seriously fugly pictures of me in them.
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