Fresh from sixty radio and TV appearances in 2011 alone, the popular historian and constitutional expert, Kate Williams, is on Shelf Life this week. She tells us about her religious fervours under the covers and what’s worse than finding Mein Kampf on someone’s bookshelf. Her first novel, The Pleasures of Men, is out tomorrow.
1) What are you reading at the moment?
Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic, Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and H.B. Morse’s 1920s work The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China — my next novel is about China in the nineteenth century.
2) As a child, what did you read under the covers?
The Bible. I experienced an intensely religious phase when I was younger.
3) Has a book ever made you cry and if so which one?
Anna Karenina. I find the pain of Anna and Vronsky almost unbearable.
4) You are about to put in solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose?
My two favourite books, Richardson’s Clarissa and The Story of the Stone by Cao Xuequin, and The Koran — which I wish I knew in more detail than I do.
5) Which character would you most like to sleep with?
Robert Lovelace from Clarissa — not to love him but to take revenge upon him. Mind you, in thinking that, I am falling into his trap….
6) If you could write a self-help book, what would you call it?
‘Books can make you happier’. Books can rescue even the darkest moments.
7) Michael Gove has asked you to rewrite the GCSE English Literature Syllabus. Which book, which play and which poem would youmake compulsory reading?
T S Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and George Orwell’s 1984.
8) Which party from literature would you most like to have attended?
Mrs Gilbert Osmond’s Thursday evening gathering in her ‘high house in the very heart of Rome’, from The Portrait of a Lady. Not the wildest party, I know, but I would like to just be near Isabel Archer, if only for a few minutes.
9) What would you title your memoirs
‘The Long Game’ — I hope that by the time I came to write my memoirs, I might have learned to approach life with more patience.
10) What book would you give to a lover?
Not my own. All the violence might put him off. Henry James’s Daisy Miller. If you don’t feel sympathy with her, you have a heart of stone.
11) Spying Mein Kampf or Dan Brown on someone’s bookshelf can spell doom for a friendship. What’s your literary deal breaker?
No books at all. I find it sad when I see bookshelves bearing only candles and ornamental bowls.
Fleur Macdonald is editor of The Omnivore.
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