Stephen Fry in conversation with Shappi Khorsandi

a warm welcome to all of you out there in the vast virtual world and i know that you’ve come from everywhere to hear the rsl’s brilliant speakers this evening i’m lisa penazi i’m chair of the royal society of literature and it’s my very great pleasure to be here to launch this first of our rsl 200 events which celebrate 200 years of the royal society of literature that historic fellowship of writers that is ever alive to the changing and to the new our partners tonight are the great and wonderful british library the living knowledge network which broadcasts to libraries across the uk and the union chapel itself the literature matters RSL 200 series brings together some of the world’s best known writers for unique explorations of the impact of literature on their lives and indeed on society as a whole before i introduce you to our truly fabulous speakers this evening let me just signal that the next rsl 200 event is with novelist david mitchell and composer brian eno again in partnership with the british library on thursday 8th october members of the rsl i should mention attend these events and all our events for free so do join us but tickets can also be booked through the british library while we aren’t able to be in the same room together tonight we do take questions just look at the bottom of the screen and type we will get through as many of these questions as possible at the top of the screen you’ll find tabs to open that will enable you to buy a selection of stephen fry’s books online including the chance to pre-order your copy of his new book troy there’s also a tab there to click which will enable you to give your feedback on this event and various social media links too so do tap away and now to our wonderful duo this evening to introduce stephen fry properly would take most of this hour writer novelist actor comedian larger than life personality unafraid to engage in championing mental health issues or lending his way to important public interventions stephen has somehow even been able to give the word intelligence popular repute in a climate where its value has not always been high he grew up in a house with colossal bookcases filled with classic works of literature using them as medicine cabinets to treat his childhood he has remarked that writing is a newer technology only five or six thousand years old by which we can change utterance into permanence once when asked for writing advice he responded the important thing to do for those who want to liberate their writing is to be able to let go of their self-consciousness to allow words to write for them after captivating readers with his formidable mythos and heroes stephen in his new book troy published at the end of this month turns his attention to another great narrative from ancient greece troy richly reimagined witty and spell blindingly told troy explores the timeless human passions that beat at the heart of this age-old story of heroism desire despair and revenge Shappi Khorsandi established herself as one of the country’s finest comedians in 2006 with her sellout edinburgh show asylum speaker which told the story of how her family were forced to flee iran and gain asylum in the uk the show led to the publication of her childhood memoirs a beginner’s guide to acting english her first novel nina is not okay came out in 2016. she’s appeared on numerous tv and radio shows including mock the week have i got news for you and of course QI she recently received the james joyce award from university college dublin would it have been me she is the vice president of the british humanist association and is also currently hoping to receive an apology from ealing council for consistently failing to remove her bins on time her screenwriting debut was in the form of sky’s little crackers in 2011 and she’s now working on a drama script for bbc television stephen Fry over to you so hello stephen fry hello it’s so nice to be here with you in this beautiful deserted union chapel it’s rather extraordinary it’s the first reasonably public event i’ve been involved in since the 15th of march when i was in the royal festival hall and it’s a rather amazing experience really seeing this empty there is no audience really i mean you’ve got some family here and we’ve got our camera people but that’s it i kind of i think it’s beautiful though because every time i’ve been in this room before it’s been heaving we’ve been watching comedy performing comedy watching bands and now it’s just like a still old friend and i’m delighted to be chatting with you literature matters now this is a a a real uh exciting thing for me because i get to sit here and ask you whatever i like about literature and i guess the first thing i want to ask you is that obviously you’re known as someone who is terribly well read when did you at what point in your childhood did you discover well i was always quite sort of perkily adept at reading and writing from a very early age i think and this isn’t false modesty because i’m so bad at everything else that nature is odd like that and and i have as the old joke has it van gogh’s ear for music and um i can’t paint or draw and i can’t you know run in a straight line or catch a ball or dance or or you know do almost anything but but language from a very early age was extremely important to me and i i’m sure you’re like that as well as a as a reader and a comedian and so some of whom words have always had a very special part of one’s you know consciousness and being and the surprise is it’s not true of everybody because it is the miracle of humanity this thing that we are doing and i’m doing it no more by talking than you are by listening you’re processing language just as much as i am by talking and it’s incredible incredible art and i’ve always thought it i always found words remarkable and i remember very early at school getting stared at and treated as peculiar because a music teacher had written the word orchestra on the blackboard to she was going to start and tell us all about the instruments in the orchestra as you always do and i yelped cart horse because i saw the anagram just coming out of it a bit like some sort of strange floating thing i saw the letters rearrange and um uh and people thought that was odd uh and i used to read it was a boarding school and i used to read stories i mean alistair mclean you know sort of all mclean is it thrillers and things under the covers with the torch in the dormitory at night i was always the one asked to read the story and i loved doing it uh but it really took off for a number of reasons which i think you’d probably understand well i know when i was about maybe 11 or 12 growing up deep in the countryside um far from the nearest habitation or as sydney smith the great um early 19th century whit put it when he was moved to a new parish he was a divine a parish priest and he wrote a letter to a friend and said i find i am simply miles from the nearest lemon isn’t that wonderful it kind of gives and we were miles from the nearest lemon in in rural norfolk you know you’d have to have to find one in a market in norwich somewhere but and my parents didn’t approve of television very much so there was a tiny little television store that you know which came out for big events like churchill’s funeral or man landing on the moon but one rainy sunday i watched a film and i was absolutely captivated by it because of the language i had never heard people speaking in the way they did i remember a man saying to a woman i hope i will not in any way offend you if i say that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection and i sort of followed this thing and i laughed it was funny then i ran to my mother afterwards and i said mother would you be in any way offended if i said that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection and she said what are you talking about anyway she said oh because i explained what i’ve been watching she said that’s the importance of being earnest and i said well what is it she said well it’s a play and it was the film i’d watched the film the anthony asked film well being in the middle of the country the nearest library was a long way away but there was a mobile library this little gray van that would come every other thursday and about half a mile down the lane would stop and a few cottages and houses in our house would go and queue up so i went into this this pantechnicum and and asked if they had the importance of being earnest by oscar wilde when you were 20 years old and the lady with the powdery cheeks and the chain and her pants nay said well let me have a look young man and she gave it to me and i rushed home it was a collection of four his four comedies you know woman of no importance ideal husband and lady windermere’s fan and and i read them covered and particularly the importance of being honest which i kind of learnt by heart i just i wanted to own it i wanted to eat it and then two thursdays later i rushed down and i said have you got anything more about and she found her complete works so i took that and i started we did some of it mysterious the soul of man under socialism and essays like that but you know there were the children’s stories the wonderful fairy stories and other things and i just found him mesmerizing the way he used words and then i came back two weeks later and i said we’ve got anything more she said well you’ve just had the complete works and that if that’s the complete works that’s the complete works um and so i went up and down the library shelves and i saw a book the trials of oscar wilde i said but there’s this she looked at me said how old are you young man and i sort of lied i said 14. she said i don’t think you should be reading that i said no please please i’m i’m really really you know i admire this man so much she said well all right she’s stamped it out and i started to read about this extraordinary fellow and his group of friends and i was mesmerized by the power he had over people through his wit and his language and his charm and this circle then slowly it imploded his world became this nightmare of the trial and imprisonment and of course somewhere inside myself i knew that i shared a nature that was like his so it gave me a terrible shock i associated the literary power and the majesty of his language and the such a high sense of art and beauty and and it was such an exciting world but at the same time doomed and then i would get on a bicycle and ride to norwich which is about 12 miles away and there was a big library there and the equivalent of the world wide web is the bibliography the card indexes you look at the book and in the back are the source books for that book and you so i would make lists and i would read about reggie turner and richard lagalian and max bierbaum and obviously bosey his lover and all these other characters until i it widened and widened and over the three or four years of my early adolescence i had become a sort of mad addict of late 19th century literature and all the connections that then grew and grew right up through to the sort of paul boles’s and then american writers it wasn’t all the sexuality though there was that charge and i found libraries places of magical eroticism and danger and a kind of kingdom like the male matilda well yes i suppose and i need to know if you’re the same with me i i if if i’d been born 20 years later i would have been a lot less convinced that my life would be one of seclusion and guilt and shame and hiding away but also i would never have i suspect had this key to literature it may be it may be almost a bad reason to to welcome and to to find literature uh the fact that it chimes with something my instinct when you talk about um finding Wilde at such a young age and connecting with him um actually that’s a very tender age to realize that that thing about yourself that you’re keeping hidden belongs also to somebody that you admire so much and then to read what the officials of the day did to him and then up to be just 12 11 or 12 and come across homophobia yes of that extent to someone you admire so much do you think that was like contributing to perhaps not being able to i think it’s a double thing because in some ways you’re also getting a vindication um some of the older people watching may remember panther books which was a paperback imprint i think about anthony blonde was the publishing uh genius behind it and they published um roger perfect and uh jean journey and european what we’d now call queer literature i suppose and there was a freedom and a and a fury and a zest about that that that uh that made it slightly less i mean the rule was if you were british you would escape england you would you would you would go to through france to italy to capri or to tangier in north africa to the sunlight and the decadence and the freedom and the license of uh away from the sort of dark fusty puritanism of- go west- exactly um but i mean i mustn’t paint myself as someone who was just pure literally figure i also i mean i loved pg woodhouse and to this day i love pg woodhouse and i loved um uh conan doyle and evelyn war and um uh and and many other writers and uh and i loved and still loved agatha christie and i used to tear through books apparently insomnia was the other thing oh can you do you find it easy to read with insomnia because some insomniacs part of the um battle with it it’s uh difficult to concentrate on reading well fortunately i’m no longer an insomniac but what i used to do was yeah it was difficult to read in bed while trying to get sleep and then thinking i’ll read and stuff but if you you go and sit in a chair and read then somehow i found out i could do an hour of reading in a chair and then go to bed and could sleep some weird way doing it but but um yeah the question is if the internet had existed would i have turned to books i i really doubt it in the original sense of doubt i fear um uh and in that sense as in so many others i feel really lucky to be the generation i am absolutely you know that is a big thing for um for now and you know i have two children who are my eldest certainly is far more interested in the dramatic visual yeah of um online whereas you know i’m his mom he grew up reading we grew up reading together and and you know i used to read him when he was nine and big a book called johnny swanson about a boy who’d lost his son his dad in the war and and then was being bullied and his mother’s house was being taken away by a horrible landlord and he was nine and he got really teary and he reacted emotionally to it um so i’m hoping just recently we had a chat and he said well i just can’t get into it and i you know my passion is these games and i was like you just you wait till your heart gets broken you know minecraft can’t help you then then you’ll want poetry then you’ll want words because the i mean i be careful what you wish for of course and i i welcomed the digital age when it started to arrive in the late 80s and particularly through the 90s but reading is a private experience between you and the writer absolutely private unmitigated by anything it’s the page it’s it was historically printed and you own it so even reading something on an electronic format on an ipad or a kindle uh there are so many ways of you know you select text it knows what you’re reading you you’re almost aware that you are being watched in your reading amazon knows you have this kindle you know it’s it’s it’s still participatory and participatory things are good you know they predate writing and reading uh they’re sitting in caves telling each other stories was a communal act so in a sense what’s happening with the the the sort of the lack of privacy in reading now is perhaps harking back to an older period but i miss the idea of this unique engagement with a writer it’s just you and them you know i remember when i was at school um we had to have a special assembly because local people had been complaining about the children from the school because they were reading on their walk home and not looking where they were going when they were crossing the road and i remember i was one of those children that on your walk home you you want to escapism you know a child doesn’t want to just bounce along the road so we’d read our books and then next you know you’re in the middle of the road and now of course it’s the same but with phones so what and i try not to lament it too much because you have to move with the times it’s pure escapism that’s all it is and somehow literature has now become this highbrow thing ordinary reading has become a high regard as a high brow pursuit yeah and and that’s it no it isn’t and i suppose the urgency of which is why i’m you know so pleased to be a member of this uh literary society uh because so much of it is outreach as they say in the church you know trying to you know fuse with libraries and other institutions to to make reading a an obvious act of pleasure and not not to make it a worthy thing or a medicine or a kind of you know a level that you have to reach but but also transgressive and wicked and naughty and and and full of fun and danger and fizz and juice like we saw still a text as well and parties to say is it that the the juiciness the the pleasure the joy of the text and and and of the fact that it is a sensory experience it’s not just good for you or and it’s hard to know how to do that i remember saying to my publisher when i first was being published and they were talking about these things called ad shells which i’d never heard of and i i as so often i i kind of it was too late for me to ask what they were i’d kind of nodded but actually all they are is glass posters put a poster in you know in in on going up tube uh escalators and things those apparently ad shells um and uh and i said well maybe instead of spending all that money maybe maybe all the publishers should get together and do some television ads in which i don’t know they show people on buses who are in jungle costumes or are diving under water or weird because they’re reading and the reading is taking them out of the the commuter train or the or the bus and to show that what a portal to to another world a book can be and how thrilling it is and how dangerous rather than being a sort of speccy kind of clever thing to do i remember reading in um one of my favorite childhood books a little princess by francis uh yes and there’s a bit where um sarah crew she’s at this boarding school her father’s in india and she she’s reading and she says when i’m reading i’m totally absorbed in my story and if someone interrupts her she says i feel like they’ve slapped me in the face and i want to slap them back and it’s that feeling it’s that feeling that that for me is is the the drug of absorbing yourself in a book i went on holiday to barcelona with a boyfriend many years ago and i stupidly got absorbed in a book on the on the plane i didn’t see anything of barcelona i sat outside tourist venues um you know beautiful works of art reading my book while he went and saw the god of family on his own and all of that and i just couldn’t and he was like we’re on holiday i was like i can’t yeah i can’t and there is that desperate need for escapism i think there is people who are really voracious readers course almost by definition of what we’re saying with escapism and so on is likely to mean a fictional world and and books are so much more than that and i wonder what you felt about the cliche which i i fear is broadly true and it’s absolutely not completely true that that men seem to move away from novels i i read nothing but novels when i was a teenager and then i did english literature as a subject at university and novels and poems and uh uh what were really it and plays obviously but fictional creations but as i moved into my 30s and 40s suddenly it was history and biography and science and to this day most of the literature or literary literary books that i read are biographies of writers yes or groups of writers so i i don’t think that’s a cliche but i also think it is an age thing yeah there was a very long period of time sadly also when i was at university i simply couldn’t read non- fiction um i couldn’t read it and all i wanted to do was read fiction and history became a passion once i sort of got to about 40 and autobiographies yes of people who um are just very good writers and i i read um andre agassi’s autobiography i had quite brilliant isn’t it isn’t it yeah one of the very best sports in tennis and i think one of the first lines talked about how much he hates tennis and i wasn’t i wasn’t expecting that and again it was one of those books i just picked up from someone else’s shelf when i was i know waiting for them to finish off in the kitchen or whatever and i was like oh can i borrow this um yeah and so i think that happens and perhaps as we get older we we want to know much much more yes about i think the curiosity and and also all the things we missed at university or at school about history although all the gaps you know so it’s wonderful when you you get these like the william Dalrymple book on the east india company or the uh the Frankopan uh Peter Frankopan book about the silk road those sort of books really do because certainly my generation never learned world history in the way that we ought to have done no and so Frankopan’s books if someone had handed them to me at 20 i i would i would go um i’ve got wine to drink yes i’ve got you know sylvia plath to memorize thank you all very much i’m from the east i don’t need to read about you but now of course it’s at my bedside table and i have read it so um the relationship with what can we talk about poetry yes as well because personally poetry has been for me therapy it has been the best because the poets speak about our state of mind better than we can acknowledge them ourselves what was the first poet that really grabbed you and absorbed you um aside from my mother reading the wonderful rhythms of um uh a.a mill you know james james morrison morrison whether it be george dupree took great care of his mother although he was only three j.j all those i just loved the rhythm i just absolutely loved it coddlestone cottlestone cottleston pie and things like that then really it was a godfather for my 12th birthday i think gave me paul graves golden treasury which is the absolute standard middle class collection of great english poetry it’s sort of slightly shorter than the oxford book of english first but very similar it it goes from dunbar and chaucer up through its resolutely british poetry but it contained keats and i fell in love with keats um particularly to fancy you know and the big oads obviously nightingale and autumn and greece and urn and so on and the you know the what used to be the standard poetic fair for british people uh tennyson browning arnold thomas gray those sort of poets i absolutely love them it took me a long time to to become confident with modern poetry um but like many teenagers i fell hookland and sinker for t.

s eliot particularly 27:12 - proof rock and then the wasteland i mean absolutely adored it and just bore people with lines and lines from it it’s um because i wasn’t born in uh england i was born in iran and came here when i was almost four the poetry in the rhythm for me because it was a new language and my nature is to feel completely at one with you know the the place i’m in so i wanted to it was so important to me to get on top of the language even as a tiny child yes and a.a milne was everything yes absolutely everything because my mum used to take us to the library and i would go straight to the poetry section because it was easier to read for me because i was only you know i didn’t i wasn’t reading as a toddler i wasn’t i wasn’t doing you know english letters latin letters um when i first met you when i came on qi i was so proud i told my parents because you instantly quoted roomy to me so my mum used to read roomie to me at bedtime while i was asleep you know while i was sleeping i think roomies overtaken pablo neruda as probably the world’s most popular poet these days didn’t beyonce name her baby roomy I know i know but they they are wonderful it’s strange because obviously poets can often get rather cross at the idea that they are merely instruments for doling out uh solace to unhappy people and unhappy lovers and uh and for having their words put against a landscape of uh of a kind of bob ross painting and and some little tiny little phrases i mean there are some there’s a roomy phrase i i i have written down um which is sell your cleverness and by bewilderment which i think is wonderful i mean very very good but but again like all phrases if you start making it an aphorism or a tea towel it can become yeah um but yeah it’s interesting isn’t it that persian poetry as i suppose it used to be called iranian perch the parsi poetry i guess um that the best known in britain used to be omakayam and and um every every household had its limp leather uh collection um translated by fitzgerald you know the the uh uh the the the moving figure rights and having rit moves on and uh or nor all your party or whit can cancel out a word of it and and a jug of wine and loaf of bread and all that and and they’re all they’re all poets about don’t worry have a glass of wine absolutely no you know even though even these sufi characters like hafiz and yeah and and roomy they they they believe in in in drugs and drinks there’s a there’s a roomy poem about about the different types of you know about hashish and and wine and and how there is in everything there is a drug yeah and that it’s it’s really interesting so different from how we now think of iranian people and certainly the theocracy that’s the the the essence of iranian culture is within those poems and you know the idea of sharing and the drinking of wine and it’s just so polar opposite to our uh you know the last 30 40 40 years of our culture there’s actually i was really proud there was a half um half-assed poem with my surname in it course andy where because means contentment and joy and he says if there is to be a prophet i’m translating from the farsi in my head if there is a prophet to be made from this bazaar this world this marketplace that we call the world it belongs to the humble darvish and may may god make me a horsandy darvish because what’s he what he’s saying is that the profit the profit that you get from life profit with an f.i is is uh being a humble contented person and all of the chill out you know vibe that they have chill out vibe i never thought i would hear myself talking about persian literature stephen fry and the only words that came into my head was chill out vibe for me it’s it’s that is iranians yes you know you have a problem they sit and we talk yeah and it’s very weird where did he come from shiraz type of grape absolutely absolutely whereas britain it’s you’ve got a problem make a joke yes yes you’re right have you ever spoken to somebody who’s grieving a british person who’s grieving puts themselves in a position to console you if you sound so sorry for your loss they instantly go oh but they want to console you they don’t want you to feel they don’t want to burden you yes whereas you know a persian would throw themselves in your arms yes there’s what’s that word that descri that is the culture of hospitality in in the persian home you know this kind of turtle yes is that yeah where you offer things and you say no and then you offer again and you say no then you offer again yes please walk on my eyeballs and uh my children are your slaves yes absolutely it’s it’s generous and it’s it’s super abundant in its uh and the british are very not like that well i got a shock at university because i was going into bars with lots of people for the first time and i’d say what would everyone like to drink and iranian friends would go oh don’t be so silly we’re all in the same boat i’ll get my own and all the students would go oh cheers i love a snake and i was overdrawn by hundreds of pounds immediately there’s um there’s a very good essay that ian foster writes about english and it’s a very famous essay in which he talks about the the underdeveloped english heart but he he also describes a friend of his from india um who could not understand forster’s kind of emotional accounting so this friend who was of course we now know was a lover in fact of foster’s an indian lover of his but um would cry when when foster would go up country for a week he was gonna be and foster would say look in four weeks i’m going to go all the way back to england so to cry now is absurd you know cry and the friend would say emotions are not potatoes that can be weighed out you know if i want to cry at a small thing i will cry all the tears i have you don’t measure them and and it’s part of part of western culture which has given us technology the kind of technology and science that we we developed i suppose in the way we did is measuring things even things that are unmeasurable and i suppose one of the pleasures of art is that it it it takes us away from that world of measurement and allows us to feel enormous wells of emotion at small transactions and you know that’s the great thing about about the novel isn’t it is that once you once you enter its world simply someone closing the door on someone can make you go like that in the most fantastic kind of way oh that’s made me think of dorothy parker again one of my favorite poems of hers interior ah let me know if i know it’s off by heart i’m going to take the gamble go on her mind lives in a quiet room a narrow room and tall with pretty lamps to quench the gloom and mottos on the wall they’re all things are waxing neat and set in decreased lines there are posies round and sweet and little straightened vines her mind lives in a quiet room a way apart from noise and wind and pain and bolts the door against her heart out wailing in the rain oh wow there you are there’s somewhere between dorothy parker and mrs dalloway yeah i mean that’s that’s that’s well done that’s good memory oh you know i’m very pleased i remembered that that would have been awful if i didn’t yeah um are you ready for some questions absolutely sure we have some questions from lovely people who are watching all over the place oh so um pg woodhouse said this is from tony brown right from islington libraries there’s no sure a foundation for a beautiful friendship than a than a mute sorry i i can read it’s just it’s not like a small print yeah i don’t want to let you know but i can’t actually and there’s no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature or this is a hard one which three books would you recommend to cement a beautiful friendship no that’s very good um well it’s one of those questions that you give a different answer to every day i think um and if you’re reading a really good book at the moment you’ll mention that rather than one you read three years ago so um there’s one book i’d love to recommend because it’s just so astonishing it’s by a i took quite a dutch chilean or chilemio writer called benjamin labatoot and it’s called when we cease to understand the world and it’s it’s extraordinary mixture of poetic biography of scientists and mathematicians which sounds weird but it’s it’s it’s poetic mad and it describes the way in the 20th century science moved into the insane realm of quantum which makes no sense science suddenly stopped making sense and einstein was repelled by it famously said god doesn’t play dice with the universe and he couldn’t bear and yet the equations were true but everything altered in the world and the people responsible were such geniuses and some of the stories behind them are incredible one of the greatest stories of the 20th century the the most i mean i’m amazed someone hasn’t done a film about it is france harbor a german chemist of unbelievable talent who is probably responsible for saving more lives and causing a greater growth in population than any human being because he was the first person to invent and he won a nobel prize for it a way of of of getting nitrogen out of the air which was what allowed fertilizers before then there had been a trade in bones uh people have been digging up the bones of old buffalo killed in america the millions of buffalo and and egyptian tombs had been raided for their bones and uh you know and bat poo and guano were a huge thing and suddenly there was nitrogen and starvation began to end of a certain nature and the population boom began at the beginning of the century but he then went on for his country to develop chlorine gas the gas used in the trenches of the first world war and it it he went and he taught the men how to read the wind and how best to deploy it and was able to watch the french trenches with men shooting themselves because of the agony of their burning throats clawing their eyes out at the horror of this gas his wife who was a brilliant chemist was so horrified by what her husband was doing that one day she walked out into the garden where he was talking to friends and shot herself it was extraordinary but it gets even worse than that he was jewish so by the 1930s having won the nobel prize he had been working on this insecticide that was so powerful um it was called a cyclone which in german is zyklon zyklon b the huge irony is of course it was what was used by the ss to kill in their killing camps it was the poison gas that was used in auschwitz and all the killing chambers including most of his family who were killed by it so this one life encompassed so much and it didn’t stop there in a way because zykron b and its derivatives became roundup which is the the insecticide and uh that that is responsible for so much damage to the environment to this day so this this anyway there are stories like that in it and and he becomes what’s so fascinating is the book becomes more and more fictional so that’s one book i’d recommend it’s called when we cease to understand when we see the world a very wonderful little uh it’s good to to recommend a good publishing house that’s not that well known called the pushkin press yeah they’re really good aren’t they and so that that’s one and then there are two european books that i always think uh well they’re not european but they’re kind of um uh having european sort of um one is beware of pity by uh stefan zweik which i think is an extraordinary book because it’s such a marvelous description of how a tiny action can have such huge consequences um so it’s a it’s a it’s a fine novel i think um and thirdly what would i recommend i just have to choose one for the time being you know i i ethan from by by edith wharton do you know it it is fabulous but it’s so unedith wharton it’s not like um it it it’s not like a high society i want to write all these down before i go because i want to be it’s set in the snows of a really hard winter in in new england i think it’s a great book and um so those are the three i’d choose today well you have way more intense friendships than i do i was going to say the secret diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 and three quarters- what’s wrong with that that’s a great call you know for me it’s um there’s certain books that are very important to me that my kids read yeah and they’ve got to read them at the right time there’s there’s no good it’s no good reading the catcher in the rye when you’re 40. no you have to be annoyed by it yes you have to read that when you’re an adolescent so there’s certain promises that they’ve made me and it is the complete works of adrian mole catcher in the rye which is a book that i adore and i think anything by sue townsend and edgar the queen and i would have the queen and i don’t know the book that i loved um that i found in a dusty old library belonging to a my father’s friend had this massive boarding school in oxfordshire so it was this big stately home and we used to go there for sunday lunch we were kids and we you know the adult conversation would bore us so we’d go into the library this massive library just read all day and i found edgar allan poe oh yes and i remember sitting down and reading the cat and the canary the cask of the montiado and the yeah the telltale heart the telltale heart the pitch and i read all this and i was like like this in the car on the way home and the first opportunity i could i i bought it um so those would be around my but like it’s like saying what are your three favorite albums no what depends what mood you’re in so um dallas brooks asks any favorite banned books seeing that as this is banned books week oh well yes i know this causes many people to groan and they think anyone who says this is either lying or showing off but ulysses which was of course a banned book uh has the c word amongst many other uh many other naughtinesses um i’d absolutely love it i mean it it it is of course a monumentally uh monumentally sort of dense and rich book so that it’s it’s like you know recommending an extraordinarily heavy meal to someone it is a book to be to be slid into and never to be worried about not getting because some of the language obviously is alarming to people it’s nothing like as difficult as finnegan’s wake but it is still for some people you know if they you know uh come across you know strange phrases like again bite of inwit they look at that and think what is that supposed to mean you know one month in the luck to be an electable modality of the visible and phrases like that and they think oh come on just tell the story you know what but it it it it really does get inside you there’s a beauty to it a flow to it um so that’s one band book um lady chat is that i’m not great admirer of um i i’ve never quite managed to pierce the dh lawrence vale except as a poet i love him as a but particularly as a funny poet he wrote wonderful satirical poems about there’s one called the oxford voice which i do as a party piece which is which is terrific just making you know about how you you hear a certain accent when you’re on a bus and you just want to shrivel up and die and and i know it that from both points of view because i know when i hear it but i also fear that i sound it right you know and he’s very good at that sort of thing um who else was banned um well uh last exit to brooklyn by hugh um what was his surname sellingcourt is that right anyway uh that was a very bad book and again that was a very very exciting book to read for me when i was 17 or something because it was so bruisingly frank about sort of gay life but that was banned for a long time a strange thought isn’t it yeah we i don’t want to get into this but you know we we may be living at a time when books are going to be banned again um and people will say ah but this is for good reasons and uh and you and i will have to go to the barricades and say there are no goods there are never any good reasons never good reasons to ban any no any words no i wouldn’t ban my campfire i would be disappointed to think that people were distributed in schools and so on and so it’s playing on their coffee too yeah it’s it’s baffling what’s happening at the moment with um banning and shutting down and canceling and stuff which perhaps is a conversation for another i recently reread lady chateley’s lover um actually because i when i was younger i was a massive d.h lawrence you were yeah um and i think for a million reasons where the the region that he spoke about because as i said because i’m not from here i i was just really fascinated about the sort of um you know the colliers in the world of a colleague what what even is a collis had to go and find that out and and the class um when he talks about class and all of that sort of stuff i don’t know why i read it again recently i think i’m going through a bit of a phase of rereading a lot of things that i read when i was uh very young and with fresh eyes it’s a completely different it’s not as wild as i thought it was and but i still have a very uh i’ve got a soft spot for that for lawrence yeah he’s he does feel like blood he does feel life on the pulse system yeah and you know now with with the head and the sensibilities i have now the way he describes a woman’s you know sexuality is a bit you know it here’s a book i’d recommend in fact two books by him because he’s he’s a he’s such a sort of out of kilter academic literary critic and professor john kerry do you know i mean he i think at sunny times he’s the literary editor of and and he’s a professor or emeritus now i think or maybe not at oxford and he’s written two two books uh one is called an accidental professor which is just an autobiography about a young man from a clever young man from a quite ordinary family who just found that he had this gift of reading and he could read so intelligently but so it’s so unlike anybody else he was so out of the mainstream of either of any sort of methodology and um and his his other book is um uh literature in the masses i think it’s called it’s it’s basically a rather brilliant attack on the snobbery of of writers and how so much of the 19th late 19th and early 20th century writers were snobs they feared the masses they thought the masses were ugly and smelly and not good enough for for their books so he kind of really trashes virginia woolf and he enforced her and the only ones he really champions are um arnold bennett really and writers like that who went completely out of fashion but i’d recommend them because both books are so readable and he’s such a good clear guide to reading he makes you want to go and read for example arnold bennett and h.

d wells and 49:14 - others who are rather out of fashion these days well i’m excited i’m i’m doing a i’m doing an open university mma next year in english literature fantastic i’m very excited i’m very excited you haven’t started it yet next year and do you have you got a reading list yet that they’ve given you i have actually it’s it’s yeah some of it i’ve read already but i’m really excited about it and when you were talking about ulysses i’m so excited about reading things with much more confidence than when i was younger because i’m dyslexic so and that that was a real struggle so there’s only certain kinds of books i could read um and i think i’ve developed my own ways of dealing with it but also there are companions to ulysses which which are one uh anthony burgess or it’s a very good one samuel beckett uh uh joyce’s friend will also wrote one but perky one um and and there’s nothing wrong with you know saying oh because you can’t read it naked you can’t as it were you can’t just walk into and say here’s this book i shall respond to it without knowing anything because it is keyed to the the homer’s odyssey and it has scenes that are related to it and if you don’t know that you’re missing a heck of a lot and that doesn’t make it a failure of a book it makes it more of an adventure i think you see we read the odyssey my son and i when he was um about eight obviously a kid’s version absolutely beautiful and as i was reading it i was like oh mate that i’ve only just you know this is brilliant for me too um one of the gorgeous things about um having kids in your life is that you get to read the sort of books that sparked your interest in reading in the first place and a good writer is a good writer whether writing for a 10 year old or a you know or a grown-up shall we have another question oh right click here to view i don’t know what i’m doing look how not go there we go there are all the questions okay so um this is a question from samyogita forgive my pronunciation if it’s incorrect um lest you sh i can pick this up can i yeah oh you know i’m learning so much today about technology les you should think he never could recapture the first fine correct robert browning do you think it’s possible for literature to hit us with the same force once we enter proper adulthood as it does when we’re younger that is such a good question i i have a particularly strong relationship with my adolescents which is a long way away now um but i so keenly remember being aware even at the time that art and literature was hitting me with a force that it probably never would again and it’s probably and the browning line about you know the first fine careless rapture which you can’t hope to recapture is probably easier to remember with music because which of us didn’t discover a song or a piece of music on a on a rather crappy piece of uh technology with bad earphones that we listened to again and again and again and sent us into a frenzy of joy and now perhaps if we’re lucky we’re well off well off enough to have a much better sound system and can hear it as many times as we like and we still love that piece of music but we’re never going to have that aha feeling that absolute feeling and there’s no point regretting it because that but but you can it’s like when you go back to your school or something to give a talk and you think this chapel was never as small as this it was huge once uh you know things look different and time does extraordinary things to to time and memory to do remarkable things to to to physical objects and to things like books but but you go such is the power of the the created world of a book whether it’s high literature or a thriller it doesn’t really matter but there can be a believe me a 50-year gap and when you pick it up again your mind is taken to the same room that you constructed the scenes in when you first read it yeah so you know if you if you if you had a particular way of seeing sherlock holmes and watson’s room in baker street when you pick the book up and get there it is again or a particular way of looking at long john silver or whatever you know it doesn’t matter how long ago it’s all still inside your brain and so there’s that thrill of going back and it will be a bit smaller and but you know after all when you’re very young sometimes did you have that thing when there were illustrations in a book there were some you were afraid of and you’d turn the page rather slowly because you knew that picture was coming well that’s a marvelous thing isn’t it and of course you won’t get that back but but you might still get a little tickle of it and and it’s necessary that that we accept growing older and not having the the the mind and heart of a teenager at least not only having the heart and mind of a teenager we still have that heart inside us but there’s a few other ones have accreted on top of it and i personally find age now 63 i find that a very pleasant thing to be and the fact that it’s not um it’s not all passion spent do you remember that’s a was that a virago book i can’t i think wasn’t it i can’t remember who wrote it but anyway that that great phrase all passions but it isn’t that exactly it’s it’s that the older you get you are uh you’re less involved you’re less frightened you’re less uh ecstatic and euphoric um things are less trans transcendent to you perhaps but you can choose to make them so it it just it doesn’t hit you but you can move into it so you can say i will submit to this book now yes whereas when you were young you just don’t have the choice i love that you’re less frightened that’s so true i think and you’re also more patient on you you you you yeah yes you are less frightening anyway and actually there’s another part of the same question which i really like um which book affected you most deeply or turned your world view upside down in recent years in recent years well that’s golly golly golly golly they’re gonna have to stop and think now you maybe you’ve got an answer let’s this is to do with a certain kind of book that has become very popular over the last few decades perhaps the the popular science book the malcolm gladwell stephen pinker the the uh uh noah um um harari um those sort of books have been very uh um influential uh to the whole world of course sapiens and homodaeus and and books like that uh are great talking points and we all think about the ways of looking at human development and in the future and so on but there’s there’s one uh dutch writer thinker called bregman rutger bregman who who’s written a book called humankind which i read a few months ago he was kind and i was in all his publishers were kind enough to send me the manuscript and it’s a book that argues not not quite like stephen pinker that everything’s getting better which is a harder position to hold to now than it’s ever been i think but it’s it’s the the human nature is not as dark and black as we constantly think it is the the famous part of the book that was as soon as it was published was extracted by a lot of newspapers which he makes this distinction which is a pretty good one as far as european philosophers go between thomas hobbs and jean-jacques russo uh russo who who believed that we were all wonderful children of nature and that only civilization and hierarchies and so on had had tamped down the human spirit and that if we were left to be children of nature we would be good and happy thomas hobbes believed the natural condition of man famously is nasty brutish and short and that we are beasts and we need to be controlled uh and we need to order and between these two views there’s a little sympathy really yeah um and he he sets out showing that actually we’re a lot better and kinder than many people think he exposes a lot of fallacies about people walking by on the other side or you know ignoring crime and so on the famous stories in newspapers that turn out not to be true and the most important one is the lord of the flies idea which we all grew up on because it’s like catcher in the rye it was the the british catcher in the rye in some ways the book that all school children were were made to read and and basically what it was telling us is that we’re all beasts and that if we’d not uh kept in order and we don’t have a hierarchy or a system of order we will turn to tribal monsters and piggy will fall down the cliff and the conch will be broken and and animals and painted will allelating and it will all be ghastly well he said the most wonderful way let’s see if that’s true has it has such a thing ever happened and lo and behold it had a group of school boys had actually been marooned on a desert island or somewhere of papua new guinea in the 1950s or early 60s australian kids and they had really been in just the same situation and they had formed an orderly happy society in which they were kind to each other looked after each other and quite the opposite of the so so that’s the book humankind i think it’s slightly uh i thought this who turned it upside down because i’ve always been a bit of a fooling sentimental optimist about human nature if not human history and human behavior certainly human nature uh i do think pg would have something first question i quoted uh always said if you if you if you throw a brick in leicester square it’s going to land on the on the head of a of a of a good person you know a decent chap and he he always claimed that when he lived in london he would have a large correspondence he would write his letters he would he would put the address on the envelope with a stamp and seal it and throw it out the window reasoning that the average person seeing a stamped dress envelope would pick it up and post it and he claims he never had to let it go astray do you write letters um occasionally not as much as i always feel i should i deliberately try and push my i nudge myself too by having nice stationary and proper pens and ink and i look at it and think i must but yeah i mean i tried to with thank you letters and you know the sort of proper things you were brought up to but my mother and her generation are so much better at it yeah so it used to be an activity what are you doing on sunday i’m writing letters yeah and the great writers were great i mean byron and flo bear their letters you could read you know you could read for a year they were so voluminous and so fantastic i mean just brilliant letter writers um yeah and indeed the novel started as really the first novels almost all of them were epistolary weren’t they even pride and prejudice originally was written as an epistolary novel and then i think she changed it wasn’t dickens as well um well he went in episodes i don’t think he didn’t write them as letters to different people yeah no okay so um of all your different written work over the years stephen which by the way i to everyone watching and i i can read and i also have bifocal lenses which i’m never wearing again um which are you the most proud of and why and that’s from holly and rachel which of your own work you’re the most proud of that’s you know the sententious answer is but you’re asking which is my favorite child um in some ways my second novel the hippopotamus because it was the second novel and i was terribly afraid that i would the second novel syndrome would strike and i liked the character that uh that emerged from it and also because it had so many problems to solve structurally and i was pleased with that but um i can’t answer that question i really i wish i could uh i’ve i’m aware of how lucky i am because i made my name if that’s the right phrase as a performer a writer performer i suppose in comedy it was easier for me to get books published and much easier for me to get them publicized than it is most writers and i can so imagine what a an honest diligent novelist would feel when she’s walking along the street and she turns to look at the window of waterstones or whatever and sees my books piled up in the front with the photo of me and sure you know because it’s cheating it’s cheating to use your name to sell books all i can say is i know i was born to be a writer more than i was ever born to be a performer that that that the performance was an accident that came out of writing funnily enough it was at university that i wrote a play and someone said look could you join this club this performance club called the footlights and um because we need writers fed to write some sketches and things and i would perform them as well and uh so but i do understand that um it’s so hard to get your book read and noticed yes anywhere it’s all very well talked about selfishly although i’m going to interrupt you i think i i think that that all of your you didn’t pull it out of a hat it’s not like i want to try my hand at this all performers or all comics who write their own material we are of of the world of writers yes we write first we write first a comic as a writer first and that’s why sometimes it’s it’s always a bit um odd when uh people write you know put comics and actors under the same umbrella and they’re not comics and writers are much more um close together yeah than than actors and the most natural progression for a comic writer and performer is to then write a novel it is okay so um we have a question from theresa and sarah ah can you recommend a novel as an antidote to covid-19 please well that’s la peste out isn’t it um well i mean i’ve mentioned PG wodehouse and uh i think people might get tired of it i suppose doesn’t suit everyone though i do think uh if people knew what a great writer he was just simply at the level of the sentence what a simply extraordinary uh pusher of the pen or tapper of the keyboard in his case he was um so i would always say yeah go you know read the inimitable jeeves for example a collection of jeeves taught stories or you know lord emsworth and others of blanding’s ones because it’s not just that he writes so beautifully and they’re not all just silly asses who are all upper class brain oaths with monocles it’s not that sort of thing at all there is a sunniness an interior benevolence which is very hard to find in many other writers and it’s not something that could be faked it’s it’s real there’s a uh evil in war who was quite the opposite i mean also a brilliant writer and a brilliant comic writer but with a heart of malice and and cruelty um he said you know he writes of eden before the fall it is a pre-lapserian i think it’s the word for that isn’t it it it is a beds of for hiding under not for sex you know it is in that sense innocent which make might sound like rather sort of peculiar but it isn’t it’s just sunny it is of such a good disposition he wrote himself he he he wrote in one of his comic uh sort of essays he he wrote about how the majority of his letters came from um prisoners and uh people in hospitals when he came to to sort of tot up the letters he got and he was saying that to another writer who said so the the sick and the and the criminally disposed uh uh are those who like your books and would have thought well i suppose that maybe that’s right then he thought well maybe it’s just those who most need cheering up and and it is just stuck it is to be cheered up is a good thing i i i know this sounds rather weak but i do think cheerfulness is is the eighth of the you know the great virtues it is such a a wonderful thing and in the face of a world where cheer is hard to find not just stoical resolution and you know putting a head down and facing the buffeting winds but actually to be cheerful is a remarkable thing and you don’t have to be alive to be cheerful that’s the glory of literature is that there are dead voices that can be raised to solace and to calm but also to cheer i totally agree with you you know right now we we are really um undervaluing cheerfulness and we look for our camps of anger fury and inspiration and all of that and okay so here is a question from brian as a teenager i always intended to become a fiction writer but in my 20s and i’m now in my late 20s i haven’t been able to get back into it what would you say is the trick to getting back into writing well the the trick is to do it i know that sounds silly but and the trick is not to let yourself stop doing it but the most common experience i think for people who write is that they they write a very good first page in a damn good second page and probably the third page is excellent and maybe a good chapter and possibly even a good chapter and a half and then bang they hit a wall and they lose faith and confidence and and the advice i give it’s not for everybody but it sort of works for me is write your way out of it just keep on writing and let it be nonsense because allow it to be a ball of plasticine and and the more plasticine there is the more you can then go back and shape it yes michelangelo when doing the david didn’t start on the toe and make the toe perfect and then throw it away because it wasn’t and then finally when that toe was perfect the other toe and then build up he he roughed out the shape and then went in so you can do that with the book so don’t give up because it isn’t perfect uh after the fourth page and uh just keep going absolutely there um and if i may also offer my advice i’ve only i’m on my third book writing and you say you’re in your late 20s brian jay i remember all always knowing i was going to write books but also in my 20s i and early 30s i knew that i wanted to be out yeah i you know i’m a stand-up comic and i and i knew that it wasn’t until i was older i would have i would want to hold myself away and i remember when i was writing my my second book i was stuck and i didn’t know what to write and um my my son who i think was about nine at the time ten what good ages they are he went oh come on mommy just let the dumb stuff out first yes right how wise let the dumb stuff out don’t be afraid of being terrible in any creative endeavor because you no reader is reading it while it’s done absolutely you’ve always got the chance to go back and improve it and improve it yes especially with the technology of word processes and so forth and it’s quite fun as well it’s you you rewrite yeah exactly thomas mann said a writer is just an ordinary person who finds writing more difficult than anybody else in other words writers realize how hard it is and that doesn’t stop them because most people think oh i’m finding this too difficult i can’t be a writer no if you’re finding it difficult that means you are a writer a writer understands how hard it is it is insanely difficult to write i mean what i mean there are three major elements i suppose you could say there’s character and there’s story and there’s language and each one of those different people find you know hard some people find the getting the right characters difficult others have the characters just walking in and then announcing themselves in their books but can’t make a plot can’t make a story you can’t get a character out of a room into a hospital visit do i do i take them out of the room down the stairs into the car along the street or do i just cut you know we use cinematic language don’t we yeah and and and then you go to look at another book how do they do it and all of that everybody goes through that they’re bound to um and that’s part of the the excitement do i do he said or he replied she she said kirkley or adjectives are always bad aren’t they or are they and you know there is the problem all those are issues of self-consciousness and as with acting or any other form of sport you know any other form of performance really self-consciousness is is what makes you fall from the the tight trip um and if you just you know abandon this self it’s weird because you’re throwing yourself into it it is yourself controlling your universe but don’t think there’s a teacher watching you or there’s a you know or that you’re your own teacher just let it because it’s hard sometimes like because i um a few years ago i started reading coetzee for the first does that pronounce his name so for ages when i was writing i i was like well if there’s far too many words in this sentence yeah he wouldn’t have written it like that and i i have to pass the hemingway problem yes i have to stop reading yeah if i’m writing yeah because they get into my head and there’s a very good book i’d recommend doing by cyril connolly who was a great arbiter of literary taste in the middle of the 20th century and he wrote a book called the enemies of promise and the first half of it is a description of two different kinds of writing which is very simplistic in a way but it’s pretty he calls one mandarin which is ornate language language that is self-conscious and flowery it doesn’t have to be actually flowery but which relishes the joy of the text and the word and there is the non-mandarin which we think of as like you know hemingway nick saw the fish and nick’s father said that’s the fish and nick said i could see the fish you know wow but somehow it’s brilliant in the hands of hemingway but it is absolutely bald and clear like good thriller writing like like lee child or something like that you know jack reacher writing really clean and you know without ornament um i i realized very early on i couldn’t write like that i just you know and it annoys some people there’s a profusion of words i just love doing that some sometimes i have to trim them back but but but i want the growth of language i i like that and and you have to decide what kind of right you are i think that’s yeah and i think you have to be very um kind with your with yourself and think you know i know that i’ll probably never write the sort of books that i i read but that’s okay because what i write sorry i’m just going to go on about that you’ve asked about writing now it’s your own fault um i write in the voice of a 17 year old 16 year old young woman in my first novel and in this novel and i think i’m gonna have to do this until i stop doing it yeah whatever but that’s right that’s what your readers will probably be is an adolescent voice i can’t write in my own age yet we shall see maybe i’m just as the old joke has it avoid cliches like the play yeah exactly okay so okay this is from naomi calagaro could you please comment and this is directed to you steven she didn’t specify that but i’m going to throw it to you could you please comment on the role of irish writers in english literature oh it’s enormous isn’t it well particularly in the 20th century of course i mean there are these giant irish writers joyce and beckett and shaw who is less fashionable now of course and the playwrights um and all the way up through the john banvilles and so on and i suppose it’s a very noticeable thing that english which is the language of the oppressor in ireland was taken by them and repurposed into a a living flowering thing that they they made better than than the english i mean you know the whole ah the joy of it you know the thrill of it the the the the intensity and the wit and the um indeed the mandarin language the the sheer the sheer belief that language is a musical instrument in everybody’s throat and that it can seduce and beguile and delight it’s a very irish thing and it’s spat back at the british to some extent you feel that we’re all too i say you can’t talk like that you know um and i think that’s true of a lot of uh what we charmingly call commonwealth writing in other words ex- colonial uh english writing from nigeria and and the west indies and all kinds of other places is that english force measure is the language they speak fosmosia is not english stephen that’s a perfectly preposterous way of putting it but you know what i mean and um and if they’re going to speak it they’re not going to speak it as it were with the finger on the forelock they’re going to speak it proudly and so i think it’s it’s there’s something so energetic about irish literature it’s been it’s been a you know a force of uh uh in in in our literature that is hard to overestimate isn’t it and i i love it i mean i’ve started rereading beckett’s um not plays but his you know malone dies and all that form and he just i mean it’s breathtaking you have to put the book down and go home and you have to read it out loud as well because it’s so so oral that’s what i was going to ask you do you do you read out loud to yourself a lot well during lockdown i i have mostly in been in norfolk where i have a place where all my families my mother’s not that far away and my sister and my brother all the family are there but i have this um sound studio i mean it sounds very grand it’s it’s it’s not like some soho thing but it’s yeah i mean it is a it’s purpose built it’s a thing you can get and um so i’ve been reading reading books for for uh for audio for audiobooks which which is a fantastic pleasure and for example i did some orwell and um i’d never never read orwell out loud orwell is one of those writers everybody kind of knows animal farm in 1984 they know the stories but if you if you had someone who could do a parody of an all-wealth paragraph i’d you know i’d give them a large amount of money because does he have a style he has a he has a perfect non-style yeah he wrote about it graham greene’s slightly similar you kind of think you can’t do a parody of that you could do a parody of so many writers but a pastiche of all well you’d only do a pastiche of 1984 but that wouldn’t be of all well it would be of the story yeah so it was fascinating to read it out loud and you realize he does have certain certain mannerisms which are very interesting and very which repeat a lot you become so much more aware of a writer’s use of language when you read it out no there’s no question about that i get quite emotional i my voice cracks sometimes if i’m reading yeah out loud if i want to read a you know i got really excited about some poem and i went to read it out to a friend and sort of standing in my kitchen um yeah it is absolutely do do you um do you listen to audiobooks at all do you plug in just started to i i i was a i was i never used to but um i do now and this is an age thing i used to run and listen to music but now i run and listen to audio books yes i found with music you’re always stopping and saying no no not that true not that tragic this is another one yeah whereas they are um edited um oh no i i can’t be doing it but i didn’t really look for the to something on audio and out loud i repeated a phrase i just heard because it was it was so beautiful i was just found myself sort of outside boots sort of talking out loud to myself and i was like no this is good this is good it felt really good do you have a companion to telling you a story as you go for a walk fantastically good it’s the best thing we used to have them when i was a kid tapes yes tapes of stories i did the harry potter books and uh um you you spent about half an hour afterwards going side a oh you no cassette three side a cassette three side b cassette four side a and he just dropped but there was so many it’s exhausting as well okay who is your favorite female author that’s tough it’s very tough uh i would say i don’t really notice the gender which is called nonsense uh sure it it’s it’s you can’t dismiss jane um uh i i take great pleasure every year in reading this is really pretentious but the the oxford edition of jane austen on oxford india paper which has this peculiar thing at the bottom right of every page is the first word of the next page oh right i don’t know what there’s probably a printer’s name for that little thing with i’ve never seen it it’s the only sort of big addition i know that in and i am i always have been passionate about jane austen that and persuasion in mansfield park those three emma i do like and i like all the others as well but particularly love mansfield park i don’t know why i found people find it rather overdone george eliot i mean hard to hard to beat george elliott i mean she’s probably of whatever gender you want to talk of the the greatest mind of any novelist i think that i’ve ever come across just the most intelligent i suppose is the word you want to use just extraordinary feeling of being in the presence of something so a real mighty intellect which it’s not because it wears itself heavily but because you are just know that there’s something so important in the way she tells tells you things and makes i mean there’s a is it in middlemarch there’s a phrase i remember thinking this is what writing does that nothing else can do music even can’t really do it she writes about how a mirror pier glass if it’s been polished by a clumsy maid it has random scratches all over it and if you look at its surface it just has random lines where it’s been scratched but if there’s a lamp you put it under a lamp all the random scratches turn into a sort of nest a round shape which is shaped by the light and she uses that as a metaphor both for religion the light of god makes sense of what is completely random and happens but also of reason so you know a religious person can think that’s a brilliant image but so can a non-religious person that all the accidental scratches that make up this randomness of the universe into which we were born if you shine a light at them they gather into a ball that makes sense and i stop and think about that and that’s the kind of thing george eliot can do that very few other writers can it’s just it’s simple i mean it’s it’s she probably didn’t think much of it just quick sort of thought but i remember being staggered by it just thinking that’s it that’s beautiful and a beautiful way to end a discussion i have enjoyed so so much thank you so much stephen thank you you’re such a good companion thank you very much oh well let’s let’s um hope we can do this one day with real live people yes and thank you for watching and thank you especially to all the libraries that have uh that have enabled this and good luck to you all in this time absolutely thank you everybody for watching it’s been a real treat thank you stephen and sharpie for a splendid conversation if you want to come to more events like these and for free please do join the royal society of literature membership starts at a mere 40 pounds and gives you access to the rsl’s events our publications and our book groups members will also have special access to the rsl’s 200th birthday announcements at the end of november so do join us through rs rsliterature.org thank you to our partners the british library the living knowledge network and of course the wonderful union chapel and now from all of us in this beautiful building in the heart of islington have a very good evening .