Robert Louis Stevenson is my favourite stylist. Each book of his is different, but he infuses every sentence with cool intelligence.
Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth — so socially penetrating, so gripping. The novel is a symphony of precise sensations and I defy anybody not to feel enriched by it. I love Lily Bart’s attitude of easy alertness toward every possibility of life.
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. It’s a masterpiece of friendship and it contains multitudes: the whole of Johnson and a great deal of Boswell. Great biography is almost as rare as great poetry and I go back often to this masterpiece just to get a blast of its convivial energy and its human warmth.
The book I couldn’t finish
Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal. Even the commas made me queasy.
The book I’m ashamed I haven’t read
Shame is overrated, but I should have read the novels of Haruki Murakami. My daughter tells me I’m missing out. Next summer, I say.
My favourite film
The Seven Year Itch directed by Billy Wilder. It pokes fun at men in all the right ways and Marilyn Monroe is a genius.
My favourite play
Bailegangaire by Tom Murphy. I remember taking more and more people to see it 25 years ago and the play has never left my mind. I can still see Brid Brennan’s marvellous face in the Royal Court production, and Rosaleen Linehan sitting up in bed as Mommo. I felt it exactly explained my father’s family in Glasgow and what it means to inherit trauma.
The box set that I’m hooked on
The Bear. I want to live among them.
Jeremy Allen White in The Bear
AP
The classic series I’d recommend to a friend
Brookside. Socially engaged TV was never better.
The new series I’d recommend to a friend
The Studio. Seth Rogen is the funniest friend I never had and crazily believable as a film exec.
• The Studio review — Seth Rogen’s satire is the best comedy of the year so far
My favourite piece of music
An impossible question to answer. There’s all of Bach and all of David Bowie, but if you’re looking for a little musical phrase to send you into life, or out of it, then I’d probably choose Edward Elgar’s Sospiri. He is famous for other things, but this little whisper is perfect.
The last broadcast and movie that made me cry
I quietly blub all the time listening to Soul Music, a BBC Bristol production for Radio 4. I love the stories of how people’s experience — their good times and their bad times — can be inflected by a single song. The episode on Nick Drake’s Northern Sky had me reaching for the hankies after ten seconds.
The lyric I wish I’d written
The perfect disco-punk songs of the band Orange Juice defined my youth. Falling and Laughing is the most joyful evocation of shyness. “I’m not saying/ That we should build a city of tears/ All I’m saying / Is I’m alone and consequently/ Only my dreams satisfy the real need of my heart/ I resist.”
• Edwyn Collins: Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation review — simply remarkable
The poem that saved me
Tam o’ Shanter by Robert Burns. It made me realise at a young age that some people can bring a whole culture into a piece of work.
The instrument I played
My dad brought home a second-hand piano when we were living in a borstal. There was no money for lessons so I learnt to play Chopsticks a thousand different ways under a naked light bulb in the garage.
The instrument I wish I’d learnt
The piano, provided it came with the music teacher Nadia Boulanger, who taught Daniel Barenboim, Dinu Lipatti and Julia Perry. Failing that, I wish I’d learnt the ukulele.
The music that cheers me up
George Formby singing When I’m Cleaning Windows.
George Formby
SHUTTERSTOCK EDITORIAL
What one painting would I would like to own
There are works by Raphael that could stun you out of your wits, or great modern masterpieces that might replenish your imagination on a daily basis. But if I could only have one painting I’d want Still Life With Cherries and Peaches by Paul Cézanne because it makes me happy.
Still Life with Cherries and Peaches, by Paul Cezanne (1885)
ALAMY
The place I feel happiest
Walking down Piccadilly.
My guiltiest cultural pleasure
Watching Seventies reruns of Coronation Street.
Jean Alexander as Hilda Ogden and Irene Sutcliffe as Maggie Clegg in a 1970 broadcast of Coronation Street
SHUTTERSTOCK EDITORIAL
I’m having a fantasy dinner party. I’ll invite these artists and authors
Sammy Davis Jr, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, Shirley MacLaine and Nelson Riddle and his orchestra.
And I’ll put on this music
You kidding?
The play, concert and book that I’m looking forward to
Ian McDiarmid in King Lear at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre. Radiohead in Bologna. The biography of Anita Brookner by Hermione Lee.
I wasted an evening watching
The three-part Sky documentary Boyzone: No Matter What.
The film I walked out on
I don’t think I’ve ever walked out of a play or a film. Oh, that’s not true. I once walked out of a film called Weak at Denise, not because it was bad — though the title wasn’t promising — but because I was meant to be in the screening room next door watching Bernardo Bertolucci’s last film.
Overrated
Everybody knows Coldplay are pish. They are total and utter mince. They are inflamed, swollen and possibly gangrenous bollocks, and as sentimental as Mr Kipling’s exceedingly good cakes, except Kipling’s cakes are actually boss and Chris Martin, who was once voted the world’s sexiest vegetarian, wouldn’t know a good cake if the sky was full of them and they began dropping on to him like V-2 rockets. God, I hate Coldplay. They make Kaiser Chiefs look like geniuses.
Coldplay’s Chris Martin at Wembley in August, 2025
REDFERNS
Underrated
The American writer Donald Antrim. He should have won a couple of Pulitzer prizes, several national book awards and an honorary knighthood for his novels and short stories. His next novel, My Eliot, is a stone-cold modern classic.
On Friendship by Andrew O’Hagan (Faber £12.99 pp160). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.