The journalist, newsreader and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s “Today” chooses her six favourite books.
Her new memoir, “Broken Threads: My Family From Empire to Independence”, is out now.
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott, 1868-1886
Not so much the best-known first one, but the follow-ups, in which Jo sets up a school with her husband, and Alcott charts the lives of the boys who come there. I loved the entire quintet through my teenage years.
The Wandering Falcon
Jamil Ahmad, 2011
This can be seen as a novella or a series of linked short stories, but either way it’s a poignant portrait of life in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. There are age-old customs, social mores and privations, as well as conflict with nation-state ideology. The “falcon” of the title is actually a little boy, struggling to survive.
The Past Is Myself
Christabel Bielenberg, 1968
I read this autobiography of a British woman’s life in Nazi Germany after seeing “Christabel”, the BBC series it inspired, in the 1980s. Written with simplicity, directness and humanity, it laid the ground for my own interest in history as reflected in family stories.
The Ordinary Princess
M.M. Kaye, 1980
A children’s story about a princess whose fairy godmothers turn up at her christening, bestowing gifts such as wit. The final one, Crustacea, arrives in a bad mood and gives the baby ordinariness instead.
King Leopold’s Ghost
Adam Hochschild, 1998
A horrifying, brilliantly told account of colonialism as a personal enterprise, describing the Belgian king’s “acquisition” and brutal plunder of Congo.
Selected Poems
Louis MacNeice, 1944
This volume by the under-appreciated, Belfast-born MacNeice contains the lyrical “Autumn Journal”, written in – and about – the autumn of 1938. It powerfully conjures up ordinary life in England amid the hovering threat of war.