Where’s your bookcase located and what does it look like?
I live in a mainly glass apartment so my bookshelves are located away from the light. They’re built around steel skeletons that mean you don’t need centre struts (room for more books!) The second bookcase was built uniquely to hold mass-market paperbacks that fit flush to the shelving.
What kind of books will definitely not be found in your bookcase?
The obvious answer is bad ones. There are certain writers for whom I have zero tolerance. I don’t like excessively violent crime novels. I don’t stock ‘fad’ commissions like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. I have a one-in/ one-out system so that the library refreshes itself. I keep only books I’ll go back to.
What author have you discovered and loved recently?
Alexander Baron, whose ‘King Dido’ is probably the greatest London crime novel nobody ever heard of. And Hans Fallada, whose ‘Alone In Berlin’ is a brilliantly written novel, a true crime that becomes in its own way, a love story.
Where is your favourite place to read?
I have an original white 1960s Aarnio Eero ball chair (like the one in ‘The Prisoner’). Everyone wants to sit in it and read. Part of the fun it that it’s really tricky to get back out of!
Can books change lives? If so, which one changed yours?
Of course! I read ‘Gormenghast’ at just the right age, 15. It was a challenge that demanded concentration and stamina, but incredibly rewarding. It seemed obvious to me that the novels represented England, sinking under the weight of class and tradition, an empire ripe for collapse. It also seems to be an inversion of ‘Hamlet’, which no-one ever seems to point out. If anyone tried to tell me it was unreadable, I directed them to the chapter in which Flay and Swelter fight to the finish.
It was the first book that made me realize you could write about anything in any way so long as you engaged and held your reader. It also taught me that plot and character were nothing without ell-honed prose.
What’s the book you’d choose as your Desert Island read?
I’d take Jan Morris’s vast ‘Pax Brittanica’ trilogy, because it would remind me that within the rise and fall of any nation there are a thousand fascinating, tragic and sometimes very funny stories to be told. The books drove my partner mad, because I was endlessly reading out snippets!
What book did you give last as a present and to whom?
Actually I gave someone a copy of my memoir ‘Film Freak’, about my years spent trawling around the arse-end of the British film industry, trying to sell scripts. I gave it to her because I realized she was in it!
What are you reading now?
‘Gilded Needles’ by Michael McDowell. I’m a fan of his work and was asked to write a foreword for the new edition. It concerns a wealthy New York family at the end of the 19th century, and their attempts to destroy a criminal family, not realizing that they’re starting a terrible war of attrition.
What are your top ten books?
Tough to say, but here’s a selction that would form a well-rounded basis to any bookcase.
- Drowned World by JG Ballard
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf
- The Quincunx by Charles Palliser
- The His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman
- The Compleet Molesworth by Willans & Searle
- Old & New London (six volumes) by Thornbury
- Here (Away From It All) by Marianne Forrest
- Finishing The Hat by Stephen Sondheim
- Was by Geoff Ryman
What’s your most treasured book on your bookcase?
A copy of ‘Where The 
Rainbow Ends’ by Clifford Mills which I lost at the age of seven and was, through a bizarre series of circumstances, returned to me about five years ago. The story was once more popular than ‘Peter Pan’ but has now vanished from shelves, probably because of its unpleasant fascist undertone, which a child of seven didn’t notice. To me it was just a grand adventure!