Nicholas Shakespeare

And it's set in a country house.

near Berlin as the Russians are advancing in 1945.

So it's a kind of Tolstoyan setting.

And the other novel is also by a younger German called Ralph Rotman, and it's called To Die in Spring.

And I've read that twice.

And I think it's a masterpiece.

For a long time, I agitated against my German friends that Germany's produced no great writers since the war and that fiction is also the province of the victors, not only history.

But suddenly I've been proved wrong with Ralph Rotman and To Die in Spring.

And he's written another novel I read earlier, which also is marvellous.

So those are my recommendations.

Well, I probably mentioned Evelyn Waugh.

I mentioned Evelyn Waugh a bit earlier.

I mean, I think Brideshead Revisited and his Waugh trilogy are fabulous and I go back to them.

He can't write a bad sentence.

With Graham Greene, you can't remember a single sentence he writes because his sentences are so clear and they aspire to the transparency of water.

But with Evelyn Waugh, every sentence is kind of quotable.

I wonder, I'm rather badly read.

Although I read English at university, we had to gallop through George Eliot and Dickens in a week.

I had to compare Little Dorrit with Middlemarch one week.

I didn't finish either.