Best books… Roy Foster

The historian and literary biographer chooses five books for “the examined life”. His latest book is (Princeton University Press £14.99), a short study of the life and work of the Irish poet

On Seamus Heaney by Patricia Lynch, 1939 (Puffin, out of print). The kind of children’s book that stays with you forever. The arresteddevelopment rural, mid-20th century Ireland, its little towns, country fairs and lonely roads peopled by talking animals, angry Travelling-people, ballad singers and lost children – all bent on a quest for home.

by Seamus Heaney, 1984 (Faber, £10.99). Chosen not only for its tremendous title poem – an autobiographical pilgrimage through past lives and literary inspirations – but also for the freewheeling “Sweeney” poems. A mad medieval king traverses

Ireland in the form of a bird, seeking a space for peace and a kind of understanding – which may carry its own autobiographical resonance. life from 1940 to 2006 via an adept collage of impressionist autobiography, sociological history and consumerist survey. Poetic, panoramic, sometimes maddening, and very French – notably in blending intimacy, Olympianism and an acidity that suggests a seen-it-all concierge dishing the dirt on her neighbours.

by Anthony Trollope, 1875 (OUP £8.99). A scintillating novel about high-Victorian finance, society and literary politics, which vitriolically forecast what we have seen in British politics since 2016: “dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places...”