Het kwintet van Aifric Campbell

My first choice is very easy since I already know the book that I will continue to re-read for the rest of my life: Chekhov’s short stories. I have never come across another writer whose heart is more finely tuned to the human spirit and the small moments of everyday life. There are many Chekhov collections but my favourite is “The Essential Tales of Chekhov” (Granta, 1999) which is edited by the writer Richard Ford and includes a very fine essay by him.

Choosing the other four titles feels like throwing a party and leaving lots of good friends off the guest list, so what follows is a combination of books that have changed me and books that I love.

Oscar Wilde

I think that reading is one of the greatest gifts you can give to a child.  Some of my happiest childhood memories are of that feeling of completeness that you experience in the company of a good book. It was tales such as Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant” that introduced me to the magic of storytelling and these were amongst the ones that I began to read to my son when he was very small.

Simone de Beauvoir, “The Mandarins”.

  I first read this when I was a teenager and then devoured everything she had written. It was my first introduction to feminism and I was utterly entranced by her energy and spirit. I haven’t returned to read her since but I know that her writing had a profound effect on my idea of what it meant to be a woman.

John Updike, The Rabbit novels

Technically this is cheating, since it’s a collection of four volumes that tell the story of Harry Angstrom, one the most enduring fictional characters of the 20^th century. Beginning when he is a young father in the 1960s, each novel covers a decade in contemporary America. A lyrical, brutal drama of the everyday and a true celebration of the human condition in all its wonder.

Scott’s Last Expedition: extracts from the Personal Journals

I have an enduring affection for Captain Scott, the Antarctic Explorer who was narrowly beaten in his race to the South Pole and who froze to death alongside his colleagues in his tent in 1911 only a few miles from a food depot that could have saved them. Scott was very much a product of his time I am entranced by the notion of heroism and self-sacrifice and this very moving story of human endurance.

TS Eliot - because I will never tire of reading his poetry! I keep a collection by my bedside sometimes reading a fragment over and over again. Enduring favourites are “Little Gidding” and “The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock” which I first read at school. Reading poetry sometimes feels like hypnosis – when you submit to the touch of the words, it is both comforting and exhilarating and the closest you come to the texture of language.

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