 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 Pignanese, 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. Shappie Corsandi established herself as one of the country's finest comedians in 2006 with her sell-out 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 screen writing debut was in the form of Sky's Little Crackers in 2011 and she's now working on a drama script for BBC Television. Steven Shappie, over to you. Steven Fry? Hello Shappie. It's so nice to be here with you in this beautiful, deserted Union Chapel. Rather extraordinary that it is 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 room. 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. I'll meet you. Literature matters. Now this is a real 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 percly adept at reading and writing from a very early age. I think, and this isn't false modesty because I was so bad at everything else that nature is odd like that and I have as the joke has it Van Gogh's ear for music and I can't paint or draw and I can't you know run in a straight line or catch a ball or dance or you know do almost anything but language from a very early age was extremely important to me and I'm sure you're like that as well as a reader and a comedian and some of them words have always had a very special part of one's you know consciousness and being and the surprise is that 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 people thought that was odd and I used to read it was a boarding school I used to read stories I mean it Alistair McLean you know sort of McLean is it thrillers and things under the covers with a torch in the dormitory at night I was always the one asked to read the story and I love doing it but it really took off for a number of reasons which I think you'd probably understand when I was about maybe 11 or 12 growing up deep in the countryside far from the nearest habitation or as Sidney Smith the great early 19th century wit put it when he was moved to a new parish he was a divine parish priest and he wrote a letter to a friend and said I find I am simply miles from the nearest lemon we were miles from the nearest lemon in rural Norfolk you know you 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 think wow why and and I sort of followed this thing and I laughed it was funny and 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 you're talking about anyway she said oh because I explained what I've been watching she said that's the importance of being honest and I said well what is it she said well it's a play and it was the film I watched the film they Anthony asked with 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 and our house would go and queue up so I went into this this pantechnican and and asked if they had the importance of being earnest by oscar wild when you were what yes and the lady with the powdery cheeks and the chain and her pants and a 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 window miss fan and and I read them covered and particularly the importance of being honest which I kind of learnt by heart I'm 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 by oscar wild and she found a complete works so I took that and I started to read it some of it mysterious the soul of man under socialism and essays like that but 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 have you got anything more she said well you've just had the complete works and that's the complete works that's the complete works and and so I went up and down the library cells and I saw a book The Trials of Oscar Wilde I said but there's this she looked at me she said hold you young man and I sort of lied I said 14 I 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 stamped it up 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 the bicycle and ride to Norwich which is about 12 miles away and there was a big library there and the equivalent of the worldwide web is the bibliography the card index is you look at a 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 Gallien and Max Beerbohm and obviously Bozy 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 bullsies 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 you like the male Matilda well yes I suppose and I don't know if you're the same as 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 welcome and to find literature the fact that it chimes with something my instinct when you talk about finding wild 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 what you may remember Panther books which was a paperback imprint I think Anthony blond was the publishing genius behind it and they published Roger Perafeet and Jean Genet and European what we'd now call queer literature I suppose and there was a freedom and a fury and a zest about that that 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 away from the sort of dark fusty puritanism of go west of Bruton geth exactly but I mean I mustn't paint myself as someone who is just you know pure literary figure I also I mean I loved PG Woodhouse and to this day I love PG Woodhouse and I loved Conan Doyle and Evelyn War and and many other writers and and I loved and still love Agatha Christie and I used to tear through books apparently insomnia was the other thing oh well can you do you find it easy to read with insomnia because some insomniacs part of the battle with it it's difficult to concentrate on reading well fortunately I'm no longer as insomnia but what I used to do was yeah it was difficult to read in bed while trying to get sleep and then think oh I'll read and but if you go and sit in the chair and read then somehow I find I could do an hour of reading in a chair and then go to bed and could sleep so we're doing it but but yeah the question is if the internet had existed would I have turned to books I really doubt of in the original sense of doubt I fear 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 for now and you know I have two children who are my eldest certainly is far more interested in the dramatic visual yeah of online whereas you know I'm his mum 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 hit his dad in the war and and then was being bullied and his mother's house was being taken away by horrible landlord and he was nine and he got really teary and he reacted emotionally to it 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 yes minecraft can't help you then then you'll want poetry then you'll want words because the I mean I'd be careful what you wish for of course and 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 it's even reading something on an electronic format on an iPad or a Kindle there are so many ways of you know you select text it knows what you're reading you're 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 the 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 missed the idea of this unique engagement with a writer it's just you and you know I remember when I was at school 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 regardless of highbrow pursuit and that's a it isn't 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 the Literary Society 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 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 full of fun and danger and fizz and juice la jouissance de la text is where an impart is to say is that 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 or and it's hard to know how to do that I remember saying to my 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 so often I kind of it was too late for me to ask what they were I'd kind of nodded but actually all they are as glass posters you put a poster in you know in on going up to escalators and things that those apparently are ad shells and 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 costume or are diving underwater and 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 specky kind of clever thing to do I remember reading in one of my favorite childhood books A Little Princess by Francis Hodges Bernet yes and there's a bit where Sara Cruz 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 slept 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 plane I didn't see anything of Barcelona I sat outside tourist venues you know beautiful works of art reading my book while he went and saw the guard of familiar 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 I can't and there is that desperate need for escapism I think for people who are really voracious readers of course almost by definition of what we're saying with escapism and so on is likely to mean a fictional world 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 I 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 university as a novels and poems and 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 literate literary books that I read are biographies of writers or groups of writers 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 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 of people who are just very good writers and I read um Andre Agassiz autobiography I had quite brilliant isn't it yeah one of the very best sporting 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 having a waiting for them to finish off in the kitchen or whatever and I was like oh can I borrow this um and so I think that happens and perhaps as we get older we we want to know much much more yes I think the curiosity and and also all the things we missed at university or at school about history all the little 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 Francopan Peter Francopan book about the Silk Road all those sort of books really do because certainly my generation never learnt world history in the way that perhaps we ought to have done no and Francopan's books if someone had handed them to me at 20 I would I would go um I've got wine to drink yes I've got you know Sylvia Plath to memorise thank you all very much I'm from the east I don't need to read about east 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 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 A.A.Mill you know James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George DuPri took great care of his mother although he was only three James Morrison all those sort of I just loved the rhythm I just absolutely loved it Cotleston Cotleston Cotleston 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 goes from Dunbar and Chaucer up through its you know resolutely British poetry but it contained Keats and I fell in love with Keats um particularly owed to fancy you know and the the big Ode's obviously Nightingale and Autumn and Grecian Urn and so on and and the you know what used to be the standard poetic fare for British people Tennyson Browning Arnold Thomas Gray those sort of poets I absolutely loved them it took me a long time to to become confident with modern poetry but like many teenagers I fell hook, line and sinker for TS Eliot particularly proof rock and then the wasteland I mean absolutely adored it and we're just quite bore people lines and lines from it it's um because I wasn't born in England I was born in Iran and came here when I was almost four um 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 AA 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 Rumi to me so my mum used to read Rumi to me at bedtime while I was asleep you know while I was sleeping I think Rumi has overtaken Pablo Neruda as probably the world's most popular poet these days didn't Beyonce name her baby Rumi 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 solace to unhappy people and unhappy lovers and and for having their words put against a landscape of of a kind of Bob Ross painting and some tiny little phrase I mean there are some there's a Rumi phrase I I have written down which is sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment which I think is wonderful I mean it's very very good but but again like all phrases if you start making it an aphorism or a tea towel it can become yeah but yeah it's interesting isn't it that Persian poetry as I suppose it used to be called Iranian poetry the Parsi poetry I guess that the best known in Britain used to be Omakayam and and every every household had its limp leather collection translated by Fitzgerald you know the the moving figure writes and having written moves on and nor all your piety or wick can cancel out a word of it and and the 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 drink you know even though even these Sufi characters like Hafiz and yeah and Rumi they they they believe in in in drugs and drinkers there's a there's a Rumi 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 and the drinking of wine and it's just so polar opposite to our you know the last 30 40 40 years of our culture there's actually I was really proud there's a half half as poem with my surname in it Korsandi where because Korsandi means means contentment and joy and he says if there is to be a prophet I'm translating from the farce in my head if there is a prophet to be made from this bizarre this world this marketplace that we call the world it belongs to the humble Darvish and may may God make me a Korsandi Darvish because what's he what he's saying is that the prophet the prophet that you get from life profit with an fi not a yeah is is 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 to Stephen Fry and the only words that came into my head was chill out vibe it 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 where did he come from Shiraz the type of grape absolutely absolutely whereas Britain it's you got a problem make a joke yes yes you're right have you ever spoken to somebody who's grieving in 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 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 and we yes I that there's what's that word that discreet that is the culture of hospitality in in the Persian home you know this kind of yes is that yeah where you offer things you say no and then you offer again and you say no and then you offer again but you have please walk on my eyeballs and my children are your slaves yes absolutely it's it's generous and it's it's a super abundant in it sir 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 but I'll get my own and all the students are going oh cheers I love a snake and I was overdrawn by hundreds of pounds immediately there's a there's a very good essay that Ian Forster writes about Englishness a very famous essay in in which he talks about the the underdeveloped English heart but he he also describes a friend of his from from India 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 Forster's an Indian lover of his but would cry when when Forster would go up country for a week he was going to be and and Forster would say look in four weeks I'm going to go all the way back to England so to cry now is absurd you don't 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 you don't measure them and 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 takes us away from that world of measurement and allows us to feel enormous wells of emotion at small transactions and you know this is the great thing about about the novel isn't it is that once you once you enter its world simply someone closing a 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 under my favourite poems of hers Interior ah let me know if I know it off my 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 wax and neat and set in decorous lines there are posies round and sweet and little straight and vines her mind lives in a quiet room a wave 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 you have a very good 20 yeah I mean that's that's well done that's good memory oh if you know I'm very pleased I remembered that that would be awesome if I didn't yeah um are you ready for some questions yes absolutely shall 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 sureer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a than a mutual sorry I I can read it's small print yeah I don't want to let you know but I can't actually read and there's no sureer 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 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 don't quite a Dutch Chilean or Chilean writer called Benjamin Labatoot um and it's called when we cease to understand the world and it's it's an 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 most I mean I'm amazed someone hasn't done a film about it is Franz Haber 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'd been a trade in bones people have been digging out the bones of old buffalo killed in America the millions of buffalo and and Egyptian tombs had been raided for their bones and the 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 of the up clawing their eyes out 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 cyclone cyclone b 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 aschwitz and water killing chambers including most of his family who were killed by it so this one life encompassed so much and it it didn't stop there in a way because cyclone b and and its derivatives became round up which is the the insecticide and uh that that is responsible for so much damage to the environment to this day so this this it anyway there are stories like that in it and and he become 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 a very wonderful little so 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 stefan thrike 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 fine novel i think um and thirdly what would i recommend just have to choose one for the time being you know i i've eaten from by by edith worton do you know it it's it's fabulous but it's so unedith worton it's not like um it's not like a high society i want to write all these down before i go because i want to be your friend it's it's set in the snows of a really hard winter in new england i think it's a great book and um so those are the three i'd choose today what do you change well do you have way more intense friendships than i do i was gonna say the secret diary of adria mollage 30 that's a great call you know for me it's um really 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 uh it is the complete works of adria moll catcher in the rye which is a book that i adore and i think anything by sue town's end and the queen and i what are the queen and i don't but um the the book that i loved um that i found in a dusty old library belonging to 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 and just read all day and i found edga allen pearl oh yes and i remember sitting down and reading the cat and the canary the cat and the casket of the montee addo and the telltale heart the telltale heart the pit and the pendulum 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 uh i bought it um so those would be around my but like so it's like saying what are your three favorite albums you know what exactly what mood you're in so um dallas brooks asks any favorite band books seeing that as this is band 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 band book has the c word amongst many other many other naughtinesses um i'd absolutely love it i mean it it is of course a monumentally monumentally sort of dense and rich books 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 finnigan's wake but it is still for some people you know if they you know come across you know strange phrases like again bite of inuit they look at that and think what is that supposed to mean you know in a lot to be in a lot to ball 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 to flow to it um so that's one band book um lady chattel's lover i've not created marioff um i i've never quite managed to pierce the dh lorenz veil except as a poet i love him as a poet 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 sort of 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 it when i hear it but i also fear that i sound it you know and he's very good at that sort of thing um who uh who else was banned her um well uh last exit to brooklyn by hu um what was his surname selen court is that right anyway uh that 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 uh but that was banned for a long time a strange thought isn't it we i don't want to get into this but you know we may be living at a time when books are going to be banned again um and uh 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 good there are never any good reasons never good reasons to ban any any words no i wouldn't ban man camp i would be disappointed to think that people were distributing it in schools and so on and so displaying up in their coffee table but there's um it's it's baffling what's happening at the moment with um banning and shutting down and cancelling the selfish perhaps as a conversation for another i i recently reread lady chattel is lover um actually because i when i was younger i was a massive dh laurence you were young 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 and the world of a collier what even is a collier so i had to go find that out and and the class um we talked 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 um but i still have a very uh i've got a soft spot for laurence yeah he does feel like the blood he does feel life on the pulse is 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 such a sort of out of kilter academic literary critic and professor john carrey do you know i mean yeah he i think the sunny times he's the literary editor of and and he's a professor or emeritus now i think or maybe not uh at oxford and he's written two two books uh one is called an accidental professor which is just a 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 so unlike anybody else he was so out of the mainstream of either of any sort of methodology and and his his other book is um literature and 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 for their books so he kind of really trashes virginia wolf and the enforcer and the the only ones he really champions are uh arnold bennett really and writers like that who went completely out of fashion but i'd recommend them because the 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 hg wells and 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 m a next year in english literature i'm very excited i'm very excited you haven't started it yet then next year and 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 that that was a real struggle so there's only certain kinds of books that i could read and i think i've developed my own ways of dealing with it well also there are companions to ulysses which which are one Anthony Burgess wrote a very good one samuel beckett enjoys his friend or also wrote one a perky one and and there's nothing wrong with you know saying oh because you can't really make it you can't as it well you can't just walk into it and say here's this book i shall respond to it without knowing anything because it is keyed to the homers 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 now you see what we read the odyssey my son and i when he was um about eight obviously a kids version absolutely beautiful and as i was reading it i was like oh mate like 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 a 10 year old or a you know or a or a grown up shall we have another question yes oh right click here to view what i'm doing look how not there we go there are all the questions okay so um this is a question from samio gita forgive my pronunciation if it's incorrect um lest you should i can pick this up can i yeah oh you know i'm learning so much today about technology lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine correct careless rapture robert browning do you think it's possible for literature to hit us with the same force brilliant question proper adulthood as it does when we're younger that is such a good question i i have a particularly strong relationship with my adolescence 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 easiest to remember with 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 listen 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 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 ones uh you know things look different and time does extraordinary things to to time in memory to do remarkable things to to to physical objects and to things like books but but you go such 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 so you know if you if you if you had a particular way of seeing Sherlock Holmes and Watson's room at Baker Street when you pick the book up again 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 marvellous thing isn't it and 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 mind and heart of a teenager at least not only having the heart of a mind of a teenager we still have that heart inside us but there's a few other ones that are created 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 it's not all passion spent do you remember that that's a is that a varago book I think I can't remember who wrote it but anyway that that great phrase all passion spent it isn't that exactly it's it's that the other you get you are you're less involved you're less frightened you're less ecstatic and euphoric things are less transcendent 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 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 yeah yes you are less frightened 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 no it's like you're a has turned my world view upside well yeah yeah here's it this is to do with a certain kind of book that has become very popular over the last few decades perhaps the popular science book the Malcolm Gladwell Stephen Pinker the the Noah Harari those sort of books have been very influential to the whole world of course sapiens and homo deus and and books like that are great talking points and we all think about them they're ways of looking at human development and and the future and so on but there's there's one Dutch writer thinker called a bregman who's written a book called humankind which I read a few months ago he was kind and I was 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 human nature is not as dark and black as we constantly think it is the famous part of the book that was as soon as it was published was extracted by a lot of newspapers was he makes this distinction which is a pretty good one as far as European philosophers go between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau Rousseau who who believed that we were all wonderful children of nature and that it 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 and we need to order and between these two views there's a little sympathy really and 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 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 was the the british catcher in the rye in some ways the book that all school children were were made to read and basically what it was telling us is that we're all beasts and that if we'd not 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 are allulating and it will all be ghastly well he said in 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 off 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 year so so that's the book human kind i think it's slightly i told this who turned it upside down because i've always been a bit of a footling sentimental optimist about human nature if not human history and human behavior certainly human nature i do think pg would have seen the first question i quoted always said if you if you if you throw a brick in lester square it's going to land on the on the head of a of a good person of a decent chap and he always claimed that when he lived in london he would have a large correspondence he would write his letters and 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 dressed envelope would pick it up and post it and he claims he never had a letter 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 to by having nice stationary and proper pens and ink and i look at it and think i must but yeah i mean i try 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 flow 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 and indeed the novel started as really the first novels almost all of them were an epistolary weren't they even pride and prejudice originally was written as a epistolary novel and then she changed it wasn't dickens as well um well he wrote in episodes i don't think he didn't write the man's letters no to different people yeah no okay so um of all your different written work over the years steven 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 where do you the most proud of and why and that's from holly in rachel which of your own work are you 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 a second novel and i was terribly afraid that i would the second novel syndrome would strike and i liked the character 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'm i'm aware of how lucky i am because i made my name if that's the right phrase it as a performer a writer performer i suppose in comedy uh it was easier for me to get books published and much easier for me to get them publicized than um than it is most writers and i can so imagine what a an honest diligent novice would feel when she's walking along the street and she turns to look at the window of waterstones whatever and sees my books piled up in the front with the photo of me and she'll because it's cheating it's cheating to use your name to sell books and 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 could you join this club this performance club couple of 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 self-publishing although i'm going to interrupt you and 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 all comics who write their own material we are of the world of writers yes we write first we write first a comic is a writer first and that's why sometimes it's it's always a bit odd when uh people write you know put comics and actors under the same umbrella yes 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 and i think that um you're being very kind well to unpublished writers i'm very understanding okay so um we have a question from Teresa 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 woodhouse and uh i hope people may get tired of it and i suppose it doesn't suit everyone though i do think uh if people knew what a great writer he was i mean just simply at the level of the sentence what are simply extraordinary uh pusher of the pen or tapper of the keyboard in his case he was so i would always say yeah go for you know read the inimitable jeeps for example a collection jeeps thought stories or you know lord emsworth and others of blandings 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 oafs with monocles it's not that sort of thing at all there is a sonniness an interior benevolence which is very hard to find in many other writers and it's not something that can be faked it's it's real there's a uh even 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 and cruelty um he said you know he writes of eden before the fall it is a prelapsarian i think it's the word for that isn't it it is a you know beds are for hiding under not for sex you know it is in that sense innocent which might sound it rather sort of peculiar but it isn't it's just sunny it is of such a good disposition he wrote himself he he wrote in one of his comic sort of essays he he wrote about how the majority of his letters came from prisoners and 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 are those who like your books and and would have thought well i suppose that maybe that's right well then he thought well maybe it's just those who most need cheering up and and and it is just for stuck it is to be cheered up is it is a good thing i i i know this sounds a sort of 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 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 know right now we we are really um undervaluing cheerfulness and we look for our camps of anger and frustration and all of that and um 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 ah 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 and 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 given 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 michael angelo 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 like 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 um and if i may also offer my advice i've only um i'm on my third book writing and you say you're in your late 20s brian j i remember always knowing i was going to write books but also in my 20s i and 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 um and i remember when i was writing my my second book um 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 10 what good ages they are um he went oh come on mommy just let the dumb stuff out first yes right how wise and if it's let the dumb stuff out don't be afraid of being terrible in any creative endeavor because no reader is reading it while it's dumb absolutely you've always got the chance to go back and improve it and improve it yes especially but the technology of word processes and it's quite fun as well it's that you you rewrite yeah always exactly in thomas man 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 the writer understands how hard it is it is insanely difficult to write i mean just what 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 announcing themselves in their books but can't make a plot can't make a story 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 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 curcly or adjectives are always bad are they or are they and you know there isn't 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 tightrope um and if if you could just you know abandon the 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 all all your your own teacher just let it because it's hard sometimes like because i um a few years ago i started reading co-etc the first does that happen that's his name could say it could say is the dutch africans way but yeah all kinds of ways so for ages when i was writing i i was like well it's as far too many words in this sentence yes he wouldn't have written it like that and i i have to personally the hammingway problem he has 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 to anybody by sirl connelly 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'd think of as like you know Hemingway nix or the fish and nix father said that's the fish and nix said i can 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 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 sometimes i have to trim them back but but but i want the growth of language i like that and and you have to decide what kind of writing you are i think that's yeah and i think you have to be very kind with your with yourself and 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 gonna go on about that you've asked about writing now that'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 fine and 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 or as the old joke has it avoid cliches like the play yeah exactly okay so okay this is from Naomi Caligaro could you please comment and this is directed to you Stephen she didn't specify that but i'm gonna 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 joys and beckett and sure who is less fashionable now of course and the playwrights and all the way up through the john bandvils 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 and 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 this is you can't talk like that you know and i think that's true of a lot of what we charmingly call commonwealth writing in other words x colonial english writing from nigeria and uh and the west indies and all kinds of other places that is that um english force majeure is the language they speak force majeure is not english even if 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 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 he's you know malone dies and all that form and he just i mean it's breathtaking you'd show you have to put the book down and go oh 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 have i'm mostly in being in norfolk where i have a place where all my family is 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 not like some so ho thing but it's yeah i mean it is a it's purpose built it's the thing you can get and um so i've been reading reading books for for uh for audio for audiobooks which which is fantastic pleasure and uh for example i did some all well and um i'd never never read all well out loud all well as 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's paragraph i'd you know i'd give them a a large amount of money because does he have a style he has a he has a perfect non-style he actually he wrote about it grand greens 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 um 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 loud there's no question about 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 yeah it is absolutely do you um do you listen to audiobooks at all do you plug in i just started to i i was 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 audiobooks yes i found with music you're always stopping and saying no not that track another one yeah whereas sometimes they are um edited um oh no i can't be doing that but i didn't realize yeah the you word unabridged but what i did find was um i was listening to 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 it feels really good to have a companion 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 that i did the harry potter books and um you you spent about half an hour afterwards going side a oh yeah no cassette three side a cassette three side b cassette four side a and just there was so many it's exhausting as well um okay who is your favorite female author that's tough it's very tough i hope so i don't really notice the gender which is nonsense it's it's you can't dismiss jane um i i take great pleasure every year and really this is really pretentious but the the oxford edition of jane austin on oxford india paper which has this peculiar thing at the bottom right of every page is the first word of the next page i don't know what there's probably a printer's name for that little thing with i'd never seen it it's the only sort of big edition i know that in and i am always happy about passionate about jane austin that and persuasion in mensfield park those three emmer i do like and i like all the others as well but particularly love mensfield park i don't know why fun people find it rather over done george elliot i mean hard to hard to beat george elliot i mean she's probably um 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 the 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 it's in middle mark 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 if there's a lamp you put it under a lamp all the random scratches turn into a sort of nest around 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 haphazard but also a 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 georgia it 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 it's 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 so thank you so much steven 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 life people yes and thank you for watching and thank you especially to all the libraries that have 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 steven 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 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