Straight talking

I had to rush into the house from the car so as not to miss a word. Two virologists were talking with Sue MacGregor about their favourite books on last week’s A Good Read (Tuesday, Radio 4), and came up with such unusual choices and spoke with such matter-of-fact appreciation, so different from the usual literary fare, that it made me want to read all their choices immediately.

It was an inspired decision by Sue and her producer (Jolyon Jenkins) to invite not just one but two science professors on to the programme in the same week; like giving an Alka-Seltzer to an old favourite after it’s ingested just one too many finely crafted novels. John Oxford, a world expert on the flu virus, reminded us of the fascination of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, but with admirable candour stressed that it’s ‘a dipping book. I would never read it from beginning to end.’ The details of life in the year of the ‘last great visitation’ of the plague, 1665, which Defoe re-imagines in 1722 as both a reporter and a novelist, can only be appreciated in small doses. His co-good-reader, Dorothy Crawford, was more forthright. ‘It could do with a good edit… all those long, tortuous sentences. And no chapters.’ ‘Did you learn anything new from it?’ asked Sue. ‘Probably not,’ she replied, crisply.

Crawford, who works on the Epstein-Barr virus, chose that medieval classic, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as newly translated by Simon Armitage. Once again, Professor Oxford came up with a wonderfully simple but acute reason for why he so enjoyed the book. ‘I think it’s because Armitage’s a poet. He’s not a stuffy history professor. He’s a natural poet, and you can feel that as you read it.’