Alistair Duncan

‘Increasingly in society, there has been a general interest in narrative rooted in fact,” says David Lodge, celebrated author and literary critic.

Niall Ferguson’s office in the London School of Economics is situated in the lofty-sounding ‘Ideas’ department. I meet the eminent historian there one lunchtime, to find him hungrily attending to an assortment of sushi.

One sporting memory has left an indelible mark on Max Davidson. As a boy growing up in Surrey in the 1960s, he idolised cricketers as if they were gods. On June 25, 1963, his worship reached new heights when he watched England batsman Colin Cowdrey saunter out of the pavilion to face the fury of a West Indian bowling offensive — with a broken arm in plaster.

In an era rich with radical ideas and literary enterprise, the family of Percy Bysshe Shelley remains a uniquely impressive group of individuals. Shelley, the poet of Ozymandias and Prometheus Unbound, a passionate intellectual, was expelled from Oxford to lead a meandering, impoverished and tragically curtailed life in Europe.

Rosamund Bartlett readily admits to being intimidated by the subject of her latest biography. “It would be impossible not to be intimidated by Tolstoy,” she says with a wry smile.

Dan Cruickshank’s boundless enthusiasm is his calling card.

Ed Vulliamy insists that he hates war. The award-winning foreign correspondent, whose dispatches from war-shredded regions for The Observer have twice earned him the accolade ‘international reporter of the year’, claims that he is not like some of his colleagues who relish the terrible anarchy of war. “Some correspondents love it,” he says. “It gives them a rush, they find it exciting. I hate it. I hate violence. That’s why I write about it.”

As one of the 20th century’s finest poets, Philip Larkin is closely studied, both poetically and personally. Andrew Motion’s biography and Larkin’s Selected Letters, both published in the decade following his death in 1985, revealed that not only was he the lonely, lugubrious librarian everyone had always suspected, but also a racist, child-hating misogynist with a penchant for porn.

There is something faintly demonic about the Minoan figurine that first sparked Bettany Hughes’s interest in Greek civilisation. The so-called ‘snake goddess’, found in Crete in 1903 by archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, stands at just over a foot tall and depicts a fiery-eyed, buxom woman brandishing two slithering serpents. The statuette resides at the Ashmolean Museum and is a mysterious relic from an enigmatic culture, dating back three millennia.

In his long, distinguished writing career Michael Frayn has dipped his quill in the inkwell for many genres. He is most famous as a playwright, creator of the intelligent but commercially triumphant farce Noises Off and probing morality play Copenhagen.