Nicholas Shakespeare

And it was kind of like cement.

And I couldn't release it.

And somebody came to visit our house in Tasmania and left this as a gift, this book.

And I pick it up.

and I read the first paragraph and I'm off.

And it completely kind of smashed the conglomerate of my stodgy novel and allowed me to kind of aerate it.

And I often wonder if there are writers, it's a rather good subject for you to ask people, who are the writers who you go to to kind of liberate you?

And I remember asking Jane Gardner if she had somebody that she was liberated by, and she immediately knew what I meant.

And I asked Elizabeth Haye,

who had liberated her when she was in a congested form.

And she said it was Jane Garton.

Thank you very much for listening to me.

I set it around a prep school in Oxford where I had been and where my mother had been and where my grandfather, who was an English teacher, taught.

And I thought I'd kind of

Anchor it in some of my own biography, but not too much.

So I have a character who has been a foreign correspondent in Latin America for many years until the newspaper closes his office down.

And he comes back with his 11-year-old son with a legacy instructed by his favorite art to send his son to the school where she was, too.

So he comes back after an absence of many years to a completely unrecognizable place.

where it's now used by the international rich to launder their children.

Whereas in his day, it had been really for the children of the middle classes who never traveled beyond the Midlands and never really took a holiday abroad.