Bettany Hughes

For years I was woken up in the early hours by screaming babies and they’d just started to sleep to a decent time when a stray cat moved into our house and she helps us out by waking us up in the morning at about 6.30. She actually taps us on our cheeks with her paw, which is very sweet, although sometimes she misses and puts her claws in your mouth, which is a bit of a rude awakening, then I cycle the kids up to school on the back of a tandem, get down here, make my first cup of coffee for the day and this is the thing that really gets the creative juices flowing.

One of the great things about having kids is that it really focuses the mind, 'cause, you know, you only have a certain number of hours in the day to get everything done, so with my coffee, I then come straight to my notebooks and this is where all my ideas go down. Now these notebooks are where everything goes; they travel with me absolutely everywhere and at the front I’ve got all the facts about the story I’m writing and then in the back I’ve got the kind of big, abstract thoughts, so this one, for instance, is about Socrates. I’m writing a book about Socrates at the moment and it says “B, Bettany, think about all those others who’ve tried to make him the champion or anti-champion of the cause”, and then it carries on. It’s usually rather kind of incoherent ramblings at the back there.

I find, though, that it’s not just the words that matter. If I’m trying to understand a person or a place or a civilisation, I have to try to imagine how that was lived and breathed and so all round the room, I have visual clues as to what was going on as well. When I travel to research, I also take a sketchbook and make sketches so, for instance, this is something I’m working on at the moment. It’s the idea of psyche and Eros, love and mother love, so I’ve done a little sketch here of a very beautiful marble statue that I found in Paris.

Actually, it’s been quite interesting having a look round my room, talking to you, and I’ve realised that a huge number of the images that I’ve got, there seem to be pictures of naked or semi-naked women. I didn’t realise I was quite as obsessed with the female form as I clearly am and we’ve got here Aphrodite of the beautiful buttocks, who was a goddess worshipped for the fineness of her bottom. Up on the top shelf here we’ve got really interesting counterpoise of a very modern sculpture of a mother and child and also a beautiful sculpture from the 5th century BC, so very, very early, but they look as though they could have been done by the same artist, so that really interests me, that there are people who are separated by 2500 years but they still treat the female figure in the same way. Probably the most important object in the room is the map. This is a map of Greece. I’ve just written a big book on Helen of Troy and I spent about 15 years on and off travelling around Greece to try to understand her story and I’m now embarking on this project about Socrates and so I’m spending a lot of time in Athens, so if I need to refresh my mind, then I go and stare at the map and try to think what it would have been like for these amazing characters to live at their time and in their day. This bit is very easy. Talking about what I do is great but the really hard part is making the words on the page live, so that’s what I’m going to attempt to do now.