Alexander McCall Smith

And I read that when I went to live in Belfast years ago.

I spent a year in Belfast and I was interested in exploring the literature of Northern Ireland and Brian Moore came from Northern Ireland.

And somebody said to me, oh, you must read this novel.

It was the most powerful portrayal of the life of this woman living in Belfast, in Catholic Belfast.

And it made a major impression on me.

And I think that started me writing about women, because I've just found that portrayal of Judith Herne and her world.

And I was most impressed in the way in which Brianne Moore managed to see the world through her eyes.

I'm reading some Trollope.

I'm reading Dr. Thorne, which is great fun.

I'm reading also an interesting book which I just bought a few days ago, published here in Australia, very recently published, which is about Alan Moorhead, the war correspondent and general writer who left Melbourne in the mid-30s.

I think it was 1935, 36, somewhere around about then.

And went off to London and then to Spain for the Civil War, covering that for the newspapers.

He'd had a small journalistic job in Melbourne.

His father actually worked for one of the Melbourne papers.

And he'd had that job, but he was impatient to go and see the wider world.

And then he found himself in the right place at the right time and he covered the campaigns in North Africa and did so really dramatically and also Italy and went with the invasion forces up through Italy.

Both for the British papers he wrote for the Daily Express, which at that stage had the largest circulation in the world, I think, but he also wrote for...

the Australian press.

He wrote a book on the White Nile.

He wrote a book on Gallipoli.