John Wilson

Why?

And what changed?

Because you'd been personally slighted then?

But like Evelyn Ward's Scoop, one of your later novels, Skios, also uses a mistaken identity device for comic effect.

What's the difference between writing a farce for the stage and writing a farce for the page?

We started this section talking about the influence of Evelyn Waugh's scoop.

In the notes that you sent us, you said it took you a long time to see that you didn't share the view of mankind that was the source of Evelyn Waugh's humour.

Your next choice for This Cultural Life, Michael Frayne, is your wife, the eminent literary biographer Claire Tomlin, whose books, you say, helped turn you towards the big historical themes that are explored in your plays in Copenhagen and Democracy and in your 1999 novel Headlong, which was nominated for the Booker Prize.

Do you and your wife, Claire Tomlin, read each other's first drafts as you go along?

And I should say that because I know she's sitting next door in her office, which is almost adjoining your writing room.

So you are each other's first reader?

That's really interesting because I was wondering, she's known for her best-selling biographies of Jane Austen or Dickens, Thomas Hardy and many others.

And I was wondering how those books or the research that she put into those books led you specifically to a play about nuclear physics and the mysterious wartime meeting between two great scientists, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.

So you explore all the different possibilities.

There are different scenarios laid out over the course of the play.

But how did you go about immersing yourself in the concepts of nuclear physics and those historical details at the time behind the race, in effect, the race to build the atomic bomb?

Complementary.

I can't even say the word Lennox.

Understand the concept.

Your novel Headlong is about an unscrupulous art historian who thinks he spots an unattributed Bruegel on the wall of a country house.