Which spotty animals got Robert Newman into reading?
What Book…
Comedian and author, Robert Newman
… are you reading now?
Alan Bennett’s Single Spies. Former business secretary Peter Mandelson’s apparent betrayal of the country during the 2008 financial crisis, when he allegedly leaked market-sensitive government secrets, put me in mind of the Cambridge spies who passed state secrets to the Soviets during the Cold War.
Like the Cambridge Five, Mandelson’s alleged treason seems not to have sprung from any deep motivation. In Single Spies, Bennett shows the Cambridge traitors to be rather shallow, motivated more by personal psychology and one-upmanship than by anything in any way political or ideological.
Also, David Kynaston’s The City Of London Volume 1: A World Of Its Own: 1815-1890. A lucky find in a charity shop a few days ago. I’m only 80 pages in, but already there are his hallmarks of his superhuman level of research that page after page turns up head-spinning nuggets.
… would you take to a desert island?
Barktastic: As a child Newman loved the idea of Twilight Barking
Isaiah Berlin’s Flourishing: Letters 1928-1946. By turns gossipy and profound, but always stimulating, Berlin’s chatty vignettes of seminars, house parties and ambassadorial receptions would make me utterly forget I was marooned on an island.
… first gave you the reading bug?
More than any single book, I think what did the trick was my mum reading to me every night – behaviour permitting. (I do the same for my nine-year-old son.)
One of the first chapter books I remember reading on my own was The Hundred And One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith. I loved the idea of Twilight Barking, that canine ‘bush telegraph’ method of communicating.
… left you cold?
I wish I was the sort of person who enjoys reading Elmore Leonard. But despite loving the film adaptations, I just never manage to finish reading the original novel of, say, Get Shorty or Out Of Sight or City Primeval.
I find Leonard’s fictional universe too loveless and cold. His fans might say: ‘Suck it up, Pollyanna! That’s how the world really is!’ But I don’t believe that, and nor, of course, do they.
Intelligence by Robert Newman (Serpent’s Tail, £16.99) is available now from the Mail Bookshop