Jacqueline Kent

I mean, people have said that before, you know, Henry Lawson and Barbara Bainton for a start.

But he actually caught something with that book that he never quite caught in that way again.

Or maybe he did, but he'd done it already.

So it was a bit different.

And he just caught that sense of...

alienation and the figures in a landscape, if you like, that nobody had quite done before.

And I read it recently.

It still works.

I didn't make the connection.

And Jacqueline, over summer?

One that I did read is actually not a novel, but it's written like a novel, and it is The Spy and the Patriot by Ben McIntyre.

And it's actually the story of a double agent, normally the spy stuff,

I glaze over a bit, but this really is good because this was a guy who worked for the KGB.

And true story, he's still alive.

And he actually decided that things were getting a bit dangerous because he was a double agent for MI5 as well.

And so they had to get him out of Russia and that's all exciting.

But the interesting thing about him is that this is true.

He actually wrote the briefing notes for the meeting for both Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev.

So it's a really, really interesting, it's a fascinating book.

But he's such a good writer.