The Irish Country House

"I really like his writing. He has been a big influence on me. My mother sent me off to meet him when I was a kid, telling me, “He is a writer, you should go and talk to him.” He was brilliant. He said, “You know what, writing is wonderful. You’ll never have to do a hard day’s work again in your life – you can get away with it, you know!” He has written all sorts of things about Irish eccentrics and his adventures in Afghanistan , but this one is basically a social history. It looks at a lot of the amazing houses we have here, and tries to go into a little bit more depth about the families who lived in them. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I can safely say that if they don’t like history it is because they had a crap history teacher! I think nowadays people are making it a lot more visual. You can have a lot more fun with history. You have an enormous canvas of all these events and people and places and battles and juicy love stories. There is no way it should be boring."