1. Favourite Music?
Mozart operas

2. Favourite Films?
Anything directed by Bergman or Truffaut or Hitchcock

3. Favourite Intoxicant?
Scotch whisky, especially single malts, especially Glenlivet.

4. Which man or woman (living or dead) would you most like to have dinner with?
Shakespeare (obvious, I know - but imagine!) If he's busy that night, I'd ask Emily Bronte. Who would certainly refuse.

5. What or who inspired you to become a writer?
Reading other writers I admired -- but I always wrote anyway. I was
writing plays aged 5. They were very Jacobean & very unpopular with the friends I forced to act in them.

6. If you had another job before you became a writer, what was it?
I was a journalist, in New York first, then London.

7. Of the books you have written, do you have a favourite?
I have two favourites - DARK ANGEL, and REBECCA'S TALE.

8. What is your favourite book?
Must I only pick one? Impossible! I re-read all of Jane Austen's novels every year - and I love all of them, especially MANSFIELD PARK. I'm fascinated by the labyrinthine complexity of WUTHERING HEIGHTS. I love Dickens, especially BLEAK HOUSE & LITTLE DORRIT. But these are all novels --I also like reading plays and poetry. I love Coleridge & Chekov -- oh, all right, if it's one book only, I'll settle for a complete Shakespeare.

9. Who is your favourite contemporary author?
Margaret Atwood is one of my favourites. I admire her work enormously.

10. Which book would you make compulsory reading?
Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY. There are very few novels that are
unflawed, but this is one of them. Perfection of tone, angle and pace. A novel that's deceptively simple and morally unflinching. I can't imagine a reader who would not enjoy it, or a writer who could not learn from it.

11. If you had to choose one book to take to a desert island, what would it be?
These allocations are so meagre! Oh, very well -- I'd take Austen's
cunning, clever, MANSFIELD PARK.

12. What book are you reading?
A book called ISLAND GOING, written by a biologist, about his
twenty-year search for and studies of shearwaters in the Hebrides. It's magical.

13. What is the first book you can remember reading?
THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER, by A. A. Milne. I adored it aged three, and I adore it still. It's one of the funniest books I know, and extremely acute about character. I know several Poohs and a clutch of Rabbits; I can recognise myself in both Kanga and Tigger.
14. Name the book you consider to be most overrated.
Most books reviewed last week in the newspapers.

15. Name the book you consider to be most underrated.
There are innumerable candidates -- but Daphne du Maurier's REBECCA is certainly one of them. Critics have been very slow to look beyond the book's genre disguise. If they paid closer attention, they'd see just how dark, subversive, and interesting a novel it is.

16. Who is your favourite character (from a book)?
Isabel Archer in Henry James's THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

17. Which book would you like to see filmed?
I don't think books SHOULD be filmed -- I think film is a very different medium from fiction, and the best films are almost always those that have been written and imagined specifically for the screen. Adaptations water books down.

18. What was the last film you saw?
The last film I saw was CAPTAIN CORELLI'S MANDOLIN -- and it proved the point made in 17 above. Unmitigated twaddle -- yet the book's a marvel.

19. What was the happiest moment of your life?
When my son was born.

20. For what cause would you die?
Better not to indulge in false heroics -- so none. I think people can be worth dying for - I'm less sure about causes.

21. Which decade would you most like to live in?
1595 -1605.

22. What is your greatest extravagance?
Plants, bulbs and seeds -- I cannot resist them, despite the fact that my garden's over-planted already. Seed & bulb catalogues are my favourite bedtime reading.
As extravagances go, I suppose this could be worse: better too many tulips than too many stupid Ferraris.
23. How do you relax?
I walk. Or sleep.
24. What makes you stressed?
Hassle & ineptitude.

25. What makes you laugh?
Politicians, the monarchy - anything pompous or pointless.

26. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Impulsiveness.

27. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Mean spiritedness.

28. Where and how would you spend your perfect day?
Easy: I'd spend it where I am now, on an island in the Hebrides. I'd
walk deserted white sand beaches, and have a picnic lunch with my family. Then we'd collect a lobster from a fisherman, and cook it for supper. It would be June, so the sun wouldn't set until after eleven: I'd watch the sea change colour, and the islands in the bay alter shape as twilight came. It would be high tide at midnight, and a full moon. No midges.

29. What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Keep on trucking.

30. How would you like to be remembered?
With love. Wouldn't we all?

31. What Do You Think of the Booker Prize?
A great source of annual entertainment. The more rows and walk-outs and feuds there are among the judges, the better it is. It adds hugely to the gaity of nations.

32. Which historical figure do you most admire?
Shackleton. I'm interested in explorers, and Shackleton's tenacity and fortitude in the Antarctic were superhuman.

33. Which contemporary figure do you identify with?
None: I identify with animals more than people.

34. What is your favourite quotation?

'All foliage and no filbert' -- it's Virginia Woolf, either from her
diaries or her letters, I forget. A beautifully succinct and waspish way of summarising an argument -- or, if you really want to be cruel, a person.