LOCKDOWN LITERATURE

We asked some of our favourite authors and actors what they had been reading during the lockdown, and their answers were a revelation

Some of our favourite writers and actors discuss the best books they read during the pandemic

The book that I’m re-reading at the moment is Augustine of Hippo by the historian Peter Brown. It’s quite an old book, maybe forty or fifty years old, but has just been republished.

For quite a long time I’ve had an interest in religious history; the foundation of the great religions is a fascinating and complicated story that’s more than two thousand years old. Augustine of Hippo is a great book and Peter Brown is a fantastic writer.

I’m not a historian, even though I often get badged as such on television (I’ve got a degree in archaeology, but that’s about it). I’m fascinated by history and read a lot of it. Peter Brown has a rare gift for doing something different. Reading Augustine of Hippo is like reading the biography of a living person; you have to keep reminding yourself that you’re reading about someone who lived in the fourth century. It’s quite an achievement that he makes the time, and the people who populate that time, almost modern.

Their preoccupations, vanities and passions are so instantly recognisable.

I’ve read it before and I’m reading it again because I think a lot of people are looking for comfort and I’ve certainly found a lot of comfort in books. With the home schooling during lockdown, my youngest boy Teddy’s school was keen for every pupil to be reading, so we went to the family bookshelves and there was a collection of books I read when I was his age.

The Chronicles of Prydain are by an American writer called Lloyd Alexander, and were very successful, prize-winning books when published in the sixties.

I read them growing up in the seventies and reading them again with my son was such a pleasure. I was transported back into my childhood bedroom in a house that my parents don’t even live in any more.

As I was reading it I could summon up the smells and the sensations of my childhood from thirty or forty years ago. The story is just fantastically

derivative, even though it is selfconsciously so. It has quite a lot of the Welsh Mabinogion – the great book of Welsh lore and legend – in it.

For people who like fantasy you can tell that Lloyd Alexander has obviously read books like Lord of the Rings and has been inspired to create his own fantasy universe on the back of it.

They’re books for children, but I quite often re-read books I read as a child. I recently re-read the Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin which I first read when I was a schoolboy and have remained faithful to ever since.

I’m very much a reader. I’ve always loved books and love to sit in my office surrounded by the bookshelves my father-in-law built for me. I love everything about books – their physical nature, the colourful nature of them, the fact that they’re like little rock pools that you can go back into almost as a beachcomber and find different things.

When I go back to books, not only am I reminded of the child I was, but as an adult I find different things within them; references that I was too young or immature to spot the first time around.

I also read a lot of nature books. I absolutely love the books by John Lewis-Stempel, in particular The Wood: The Life and Times of

Cockshutt Wood, which is a great favourite of mine. I often dip into

The Glorious Life of the Oak. This is a slim little volume about the part the oak tree

“Books are like little rock pools where you can go back as a beachcomber

has played in the history of Britain, but it is beautifully written. Lewis-Stempel turns out some of the best sentences ever written; there is no nature writer, and few writers of any sort, whose turn of phrase gives me greater pleasure than his.

Another book I’ve enjoyed reading during lockdown is Waterlog by Roger Deakin. He is another from that canon of people who write about living in nature, in his case about the way he goes swimming in the square moat that surrounds the house he bought as a ruin and did up during the middle part of his life.

In Waterlog he goes wild swimming before there was such a thing; this was in the 1970s, and he’s been doing it all his life. He threads the story together in terms of the rivers, lakes and bodies of water that he’s swum in.

The other book I’ve re-read during the lockdown was The Call of the Wild by Jack London. My wife and I were looking through Netflix and came across a Harrison Ford remake of Call of the Wild, which pushed me back to the book. I just loved it; I loved the old-fashioned derring-do and passion, the adventurous soul that comes across in the book.

The ending of it is extraordinary – the last paragraph of the last page puts the hairs up on the back of my neck every time I look at it. I would struggle to read it out loud, I think my voice would crack with emotion.

Neil Oliver presents the BBC series A History of Scotland, Vikings, and Coast, and is president of the National Trust for Scotland.