Jeremy Corbyn

Yeah.

That's right, yeah.

There's always one good... So he was a lovely man and he encouraged me to read a lot.

So I ended up reading a whole lot of Russian novels like Sholokhov and so on.

And then American novels as well, Hemingway particularly and Upton Sinclair and so on.

Because I do think you can get...

Novelists, a bit like artists and musicians, can take the wide view.

And you can actually understand quite a lot about a society by a good novelist's observations of the world and society.

And so I think they're sometimes more powerful than history itself.

Who was your best friend outside of the family?

Well, we lived in a very small area outside a small town, so there weren't too many people to be friendly with.

I had my mate Kelvin Brown, who lived up the road, and we used to go out mucking around in the woods and cycling and stuff together, making trolleys and stuff to go down the hill on, that kind of thing.

And when I was a bit later, a group of us, this is a sign of the times, I would have been about 14.

went off on a three, four, five day, maybe five day cycle tour around North Wales.

On your own?

Yeah.

And nobody thought there was anything odd about it.

These days, any parent would be absolutely paranoid.

God.

They wouldn't, you know, they'd be watching the kids to the end of the road.