Jeffrey Archer is on this week’s Shelf Life. He lets us know what practical gift he’d give a lover for Christmas (apart from his latest bestseller Only Time Will Tell) and what spotting the Labour Manifesto on someone’s shelf might make him do…
1) What are you reading at the moment?
Boomerang by Michael Lewis
2) As a child, what did you read under the covers?
Ian Fleming
3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?
A Time to Love and a Time to Die, Erich
Maria Remarque
4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose?
I was, for two years! Bleak House by Charles Dickens, Ulysses (I’ve still never made it past page 17) and the complete works of P G Wodehouse
5) Which literary character would you most like to sleep with?
Moll Flanders
6) If you could write a self-help book, what would you call it?
‘Get Up Earlier, Work Harder’
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?
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, Arthur
Miller’s Death of a
Salesman, and any one of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses
8) Which party from literature would you most like to have attended?
The Mad Hatter’s tea party
9) What would you title your memoirs?
‘I wanted to be captain of the England cricket team. I failed.’
10) Which literary character do you dream of playing?
Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two
Cities
11) What book would you give to a lover?
Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery
Course
12) Spying Mein Kampf or Dan Brown on someone’s bookshelf can spell havoc for a friendship. What’s your literary dealbreaker?
The Labour Party Manifesto
Fleur Macdonald is editor of The Omnivore.
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