My favourite novels are Pride and Prejudice and Iain Banks's The Crow Road, Arthur Golden's Memoirs of A Geisha and BS Johnson's Christie Malry's Own Double Entry, and I'm a sucker for the poetry of Philip Larkin and Wendy Cope. I'm a total literary stick-in-the-mud and don't like anything too fancy or postmodern: give me a proper narrative or a rigid rhyme scheme done well, and I'm happy. I'm currently trying to write a script for a feature film set in the 16th century, because apparently I'm a masochist.