If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know? I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a...

I’m well into a book in typescript about Iran and nuclear weapons, “Mullahs Without Mercy” by Geoffrey Robertson, a well-known human rights lawyer here in England.

Have you ever written a fan letter to an author? Did he or she write back?In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot. (More than a review. I’ve stopped reading reviews.) So of course I write them occasionally....

Have you ever written a fan letter to an author? Did he or she write back?In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot. (More than a review. I’ve stopped reading reviews.) So of course I write them occasionally....

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? I wouldn’t trouble the president with advice, or with one more transient treatise on America’s supposed terminal decline. For the sake of the general good, I’d have him...

Do you remember the first book that made you cry?It was “The Gauntlet,” by Ronald Welch. I was 10 years old and in hospital, so I had time to read this wonderful historical novel for children in a day.

I’d swap the last dozen pages of “The Dead” for any dozen in “Ulysses.

Another recent encounter has been Joyce’s “The Dead,” which I’ve read many times. It needs to be considered as a novella, the perfect novella, entirely separate from the rest of “Dubliners.”

Another recent encounter has been Joyce’s “The Dead,” which I’ve read many times. It needs to be considered as a novella, the perfect novella, entirely separate from the rest of “Dubliners.”

Epithet inflation has diminished “great” somewhat so we have to be careful. Last year I reread “Hamlet.” I believe the play really did represent a world historical moment — when there leapt into being a sustained depiction of a fully...

Stephen Sedley’s “Ashes and Sparks.” Sedley was a senior judge in our court of appeal until last year and in this collection of essays he writes on a range of issues that concern the individual and the state.

I’m also reading Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden – a thinking man’s Bond, set during the First World War.

A riveting novel about the remarkable life—and many loves—of author H. G. Wells H. G. Wells, author of The Time Machine and War of the Worlds, was one of the twentieth century's most prophetic and creative writers, a man who immersed...

I’m re-reading To the End of the Land, by David Grossman. I’m deeply touched by that novel, which was inspired, if that’s the word, by the death of his son in 2006 during the incursion into Lebanon.

I’m reading a short book by Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy, on the nature of evil, arguing that many of the terrible things that people do to each other are a consequence of a failure of empathy.