Nicholas Shakespeare

I mean, he'd been a correspondent in Tehran for The Times, and then he was

ejected in 1952 or 53.

And I so I galvanized by this essay, I started to read him and I very much responded to his poetry.

I mean, poetry is very important to me.

You'll also notice in this novel, a reference to the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, who always wanted to be a poet before he wanted to be a short story writer.

Borges was another influence on me.

We lived in Argentina in the 1970s.

And I was about 15 when my father arranged me to go and meet him.

And I did an interview with him for my school magazine.

And I asked him if he'd give me a poem, which he did.

So the school magazine published an unpublished poem by Borges.

Yes.

He had this kind of crazy idea that anybody who spoke Shakespeare became Shakespeare or recited it.

But it seemed I had a slightly bigger claim than most.

So he kind of was very keen to know my ancestry.

And I used to go after that, you know, five or six times I'd go to his flat in my avenue to my pool and I would read to him.

He would always want more or less the same stuff read to him as he asked other Englishmen who, writers who would turn up and he would always ask them to pluck from this glass fronted bookcase some Anglo-Saxon poetry or

some Viking poetry or Chesterton.

Actually, I had to read him from Macbeth, although from Hamlet, and also a poem by Kipling called The Harp Song of the Dane Women.

And his favorite line in it was, it's all about the Vikings coming to kind of ravage everything.