Series 3: Episode 3

This week Mariella Frostrup puts her interrogation skills to use as the former MI5 Director General Dame Stella Rimington comes to the studio to talk about her new book, Dead Line. Next on the sofa will be actress Sheila Hancock with an intimate interview on her life after John Thaw and her new book, Just Me. To put a final spin on the show, Tony Blair's former Director of Communications Alastair Campbell shows off his first book of fiction, All In The Mind.


If you liked Stella Rimington's Dead Line and you're looking to infiltrate your shelves with further tales of first class spookery, here's a couple you might like to try:

John Le Carre: A Most Wanted Man
When a half starved Russian man is smuggled into Hamburg, his arrival arouses curiosity at the highest levels of global intelligence. The man claims to be a Muslim medical student, but could he be a man on a mission? An idealistic young German human rights lawyer is determined to prevent him from being deported and soon her client's survival becomes more important than her career. As the spies of three nations start to circle, will political imperat ives overbalance individual passions and human morality?

Mark Burnell: The Third Woman
The Third Woman sees the return of Burnell's feisty heroine Stephanie Patrick, who also operates under the name of Petra Reuter - gun for hire. When Stephanie travels to Paris to help an old friend, she finds herself embroiled in a terrorist attack which the authorities have wrongly pinned on her alter ego Petra Reuter. Betrayed, pursued and minus her identity in true Bourne style, she is surrounded by conspiracy. Can the mysterious person known as the Third Woman provide the answer?

If you liked Sheila Hancock's Just Me and you were inspired by her indomitable spirit, here's a couple more you might like to try:

Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search For Everything
Having gone through a bitter divorce in her mid-thirties, Gilbert sets off in search of broader horizons. Her pursuit of happiness takes her to Rome where she is taught Italian by identical twins and gains 25 pounds; to an ashram in India where scrubbing a temple floor in the middle of the night provides enlightenment, and to Bali where she finds peace through the philosophy of sitting still and smiling.

Helen Mirren: In The Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures
As well as detailing her many distinguished roles in theatre, film and television, the book explores Dame Helen's fascinating family background. Her aristocratic Russian grandfather was sent to London by the Tsar but became stranded after the Bolshevik revolution and was left penniless with just a trunk of photographs and papers to his name. The book begins with the contents of this trunk. Bit of a case of from Russia with love…

If you liked Alastair Campbell's All In The Mind and want to read more books about mind games, why not try these:

Sebastian Barry: The Secret Scripture
Shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, The Secret Scripture is a haunting study of psychology, religion, family and politics in Ireland. Nearing her 100th birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future as the mental; hospital where she's spent most of her adult life prepares to close. Over the weeks leading up to this traumatic event, Roseanne talks frequently with her psychiatrist doctor Grene, himself driven half-mad by grief after the recent death of his wife. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is both shocking and beautiful.

Susie Boyt: Only Human
Only Human tells the poignant and often painfully funny tale of Marjorie Hemming, a marriage counsellor on a desperate mission to help her battling and often downright incompatible clients to kiss and make up. But when her beloved 17-year-old daughter suddenly decides to leave home, Marjorie’s own life starts to unravel, in turn affecting the way she works with her clients.

To read the opening extracts of these books and find out more about the authors, visit Lovereading.co.uk.

This week we visit the Man Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga to find out what he keeps on his bedside table:

V.S. Naipaul: A Bend In The River
Shortlisted for the 1979 booker prize, a bend in the river is one of V.S. Naipaul's most ambitious books. set in an unnamed African country after independence, the book is narrated by Salim, a young Indian man striving to establish himself as a shopkeeper in a small city in the country's remote interior he becomes closely involved with the fluid and dangerous politics of the newly independent state.

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
The 'invisible man' is the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison's blistering, impassioned novel of black lives in 1940s America. Defeated and embittered by a country which treats him as non-being, he has retreated into an underground cell, where he smokes, drinks, listens to jazz and recounts his search for identity in white society: as an optimistic student in the Deep South, in the north with the black activist group the Brotherhood, and in the Harlem race riots. Powerfully told, angry and often violent, Invisible Man goes beyond the compelling story of one man to evoke the lives of millions of African-Americans with an urgency that has potent relevance today.

Robert Browning: Selected Poems
Robert Browning was one of the greatest of English poets, whose intense and original imagination enabled him to transform any subject he chose - whether everyday or sublime - into startling memorable verse. In his work he brought to life the personalities of a diverse range of characters, and introduced a new immediacy, colloquial energy and psychological complexity to the poetry of his day. This selection brings together verse ranging from early dramatic monologues such as the chilling ‘My Last Duchess’ and the ribald ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, which show his gift for inhabiting the mind of another, to the popular children’s poem ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ and many lesser known works.

Our trip to see what the book clubs are reading takes us to Bloomsbury in London this week where the country's oldest and only gay book shop Gay's The Word recommended a book for us:
Tove Jansson: Fair Play
A portrayal of love between two older women, a writer and artist, as they work side-by-side in their Helsinki studios, travel together and share summers on a remote island. In the generosity and respect they show each other and the many small shifts they make to accommodate each other's creativity we are shown a relationship both heartening and truly progressive.

Also on this week's show, India Knight reveals her favourite line from The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay.

Literary heros and heroines:
Stella Rimington picks her literary favourite from Dorothy L Sayer's Have His Carcase. Two years after the trial for the murder of her lover, the blaze of publicity surrounding mystery writer Harriet Vane has begun to die away and Harriet decides it's time for a break. But the peace of a North Devon walking tour is rudely shattered when she discovers the body of a man on the beach, his throat slit from ear to ear. The moment the story breaks Harriet's old friend Lord Peter Wimsey is on the scene to lend his powers of detection. Can the two of them discover who the murderer is?

Sheila Hancock's choice comes from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Published a year before her death at the age of thirty, Emily Brontë's only novel is set in the wild, bleak Yorkshire Moors. Depicting the relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff, Wuthering Heightscreates a world of its own, conceived with an instinct for poetry and for the dark depths of human psychology.

Alastair Campbell has selected his favourite character from Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird. Lawyer Atticus Finch defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic, Puliter Prize-winning novel--a black man charged with the rape of a white woman. Through the eyes of Atticus's children, Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unanswering honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930's.