"The author I've been very much taken up by recently -- and by recently I mean the last two or three years -- is Montaigne. While I was writing "Last Orders" I was reading a lot of this man, who's a quite wonderful mind and personality.

"The great thing about Montaigne is, while he writes about any number of different subjects, he himself is the real subject. He comes through, this guy who was writing and thinking centuries ago, as very, very present in the work. He's a wonderful writer; all human life is there, he embraces the whole world. And Shakespeare actually lifted a lot from Montaigne. It's quite interesting to come across those passages which he must have zeroed in on.

"On these author tours, you say to yourself, with a certain amount of naivete, "I must take a few books to read!" And you find by day 13 of a 14-day tour that you've got about a third of the way through one of them.

"One of the books I did bring and the one that I'm slightly more than a third of the way through is Roberto Calasso's "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony." It's a very idiosyncratic retelling of the Greek myths, with a lot of interpretation thrown in. I've always had a fondness for the classics. And I'm finding it engaging, but it's starting to get a little bit tied up in itself. And then there's two or three other books which are just adding to the kilos of my baggage.

"Before the tour -- and I'm not just saying this because I'm in the States and he just won a Pulitzer Prize -- I did read Richard Ford's "Independence Day," which was very good. I read that with great pleasure and absorption. It's a very good example of a novel which is superficially highly local, geographically and in time. It's something that happens over a weekend; this guy has got to do some seemingly very simple things. It's rich in local reference, but nonetheless it's not about that. It travels -- I could certainly read it back home in London and not feel that this is foreign territory. It travels both in space and in time because it's not just about a weekend at all."