Name three books you would not live without.

1. Georges Perec Life A User’s Manual. No other piece of writing so perfectly reflects, in my view, the wondrous complexity of the human mind. 

2. Except perhaps this. The complete Oxford English Dictionary.   

3. Other Men’s Flowers, edited by Lord Wavell. This anthology of poetry,  all of which the last-but-one Indian Viceroy knew by heart, was compiled in 1944, and has seldom been out of print: it proved consolation for his troops in the trenches, and its provides endless consolation for me, when I need it. (I particularly love that title, which could I suppose apply to any biography and which comes from Montaigne: I shall gather a posie of other men’s flowers, and only the string that binds them is mine own.)

What is the last book you recommended? 

Farthest Field by Raghu Karnad.  Quite simply the loveliest example writing on any subject I have read this year. It will vanish into obscurity of course, but it should not.