Novelist, poet and essayist Zulfikar Ghose, whose fiction includes the trilogy The Incredible Brazailian and Veronica and the Gongora Passion.

What are you reading these days?

Today I began reading a new book of poems titled A Company of Ghosts by the English poet Christopher Middleton, who, in my opinion, is the finest poet from England today — and has been for over 50 years. This might be news to some readers who think of Philip Larkin, John Betjeman and Ted Hughes when they think of 20th century English poetry. Have a glance at Middleton’s Collected Poems; he belongs with the best of modern European poets.

Which books are on your bedside table?

A volume of Virgil in the Loeb Classical Library edition which contains Eclogues, Georgics and the first six books of the Aeneid. I read two or three pages of the English translation and then the original Latin which I can pick up occasionally. I have an intuition as to what turns a simple phrase into an intense poetic expression, as in “nunc formosissimus annus,” which, though banal when read in the translation as “now the year is at its loveliest,” is quite thrilling in the Latin.

A second book constantly beside me is Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais from which I read a chapter or two a few times a week before going to sleep.

What is the one book/author you feel everyone must read?

I first read Rabelais, and also Miguel de Cervantes, some decades ago, and after reading other significant writers considered important in world literature, came to the conclusion that Rabelais, Cervantes and Proust are the novelists from whom one learns the most of the art of writing fiction.

What is the one book you started reading but could not finish?

This could be said of any number of books that had been recommended by reviewers, books highly praised, usually for their content, but which were poorly written and eventually proved to be worthless.

What is your favourite childhood book or story?

I can’t think of any. I spent my childhood playing with my cousins in the streets of Sialkot and my first memory of any reading is of my early school days in Bombay in the years before partition when the British education system for its colony was to provide us Blackie readers with jolly English stories, all of which I’ve totally forgotten. My real first memory is of a poem by Byron, which, being about a lovely woman, is hardly a childhood story.