Nicholas Shakespeare

touted to become the next Nobel Prize winner.

And in the end, it fell to Saramago to be the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner in that decade.

But I would put Antonio Laguantunes above Saramago.

And I think there's a novel he wrote called An Explanation of the Birds, which I've read seven times.

And again, I think it's a masterpiece.

I can't recommend that one enough.

Well, curiously, I'm always rather hesitant to reread a favourite in case I've grown old or different and find it not nearly as good as I remembered.

I mean, I reread Evening War the other day, and the novel I loved when I was

I think I read that when I was at prep school, The Decline and Fall.

And I remember it as a kind of tiny jewel with no word out of place.

I found it, one rereading, much baggier than I remembered, with lots of kind of long words, which I hadn't expected.

I'm at the moment rereading Ian Fleming.

I've been authorised by the Ian Fleming estate to write a new biography of Ian Fleming.

So I'm sitting reading every day a new James Bond book.

And I haven't read these for years, again, probably since I was at prep school.

And I'm finding that exciting because they're both very, very dated in obvious ways.

I mean, women are powdering their noses and everyone's speaking on landlines and driving cars at 50 miles an hour.

And James Bond wears nylon underpants, which I don't think is particularly kind of modern.

Very sweaty.

What I'm loving is, you know, the action.