This week Substack hosted an evening of live festive readings in Clerkenwell, London.
It was very jolly to be among several hundred readers some of the best Substack writers out there, including Nick Hornby, India Knight, Pandora Sykes and the extraordinary Hanif Kureishi.
I read from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: the bit about King Arthur’s court getting ready for Christmas.
The modern English translation I used was by Simon Armitage.
Below is the Q&A that followed my reading. Questions were submitted by readers and posed by Substack’s most excellent Farrah Storr.
Enjoy!
Dan x
PS thanks to Jess Littlewood for the photos.
Q&A
Farrah Storr: Thank you! I didn't understand half of the words, but I loved the reading.
One of your big bestsellers was The Plantagenets, and somebody has asked, which Plantagenet king would you want on the throne today, and why?
DJ: Okay, I'm going to answer that two ways. I think if this monarch is not going to wield power, then I want one of the party kings.
So ideally Edward II. He comes to a sorry end, supposedly with a red-hot poker - and even if that's not true, a bad end.
But in his day, Edward was well known for his great parties. That story I just read of Arthur's party at Camelot would have had nothing [on] Edward II.
He was a bunga-bunga kind of king.
But if we’re talking about someone pragmatically in power… I think right now, of all the Plantagenets, you’d want someone highly energetic, and attuned to managing terrible situations.
You want a sort of Henry II, who comes along after the anarchy, when you have a divided realm and everything's hopeless: along comes a bumptious, high-energy leader who can grab the country by the balls and get it going again.
FS: so, Henry II?
DJ: well, I just talked myself into it, actually. I was thinking on my feet.
FS: Excellent. Okay, this is a nice one. You're a historian. But you're also a big reader of literature. What is the one book everybody should read before they die?
DJ: I mean, I hesitate to boost the guy's sales, he sold a lot already, but Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, for me, is the book everyone should read before they die.
But I think you have to pick your moment to read it. I attempted War of Peace when I was in my 20s and it just didn't really seem… I didn't get it. There's a lot going on that seemed then to be inconsequential.
But I came back to it when I turned 40 because of a Substack writer whose name may elicit boos from the room. Dominic Cummings writing on Substack is well known for his political ‘40,000 word blogs’ transferred to this platform. But one day he did a long piece about Tolstoy and about War and Peace in particular. And that really touched me.
Tolstoy understood everything. And I think that's not just true of politics. He had the ability to see everything and record everything as it was.
War and Peace could have been published as a Substack, indeed, because it consists of these little short chapters, so endlessly full of truth. It is also funny how much Tolstoy hated Napoleon.
So I think War and Peace has a great deal to offer.
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FS: And does this go back to what Pandora Sykes was saying this evening? She always read the right books at the wrong time. You say you should read War and Peace what, after 40?
DJ Well, I don't know. I mean, it was right for me. I think you have to have lived a certain amount of life, in order to see what Tolstoy is getting at. Otherwise, it's just long and you're can end up beating yourself around the head with it.
I read Anna Karenina last year and found the same with that. But my friend Helen Castor, who doesn't write a Substack, but should, told me she read Anna Karenina when she was eight.
That seems to me an extraordinary thing to do on so many levels and possibly a bad thing, you know, from… a Freudian perspective, if nothing else. But what do I know?
FS: Finally on that note… Which figure in history have you changed your mind about the most?
DJ: I think I've gone back and forth a lot on old Henry VIII. There are so many sides to Henry VIII. The best known is the corpulent, fat… what did Dickens call him? ‘A great blob of grease and blood on the page of English history’?
[In fact the quote is: ‘The plain truth is, that he was a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the History of England.’]
That Henry, the late Henry, is the one that you grow up thinking about, and then when you discover the young Renaissance prince, the grand man of letters, there's a great tug between these two images. Then there's the cruelty and barbarity of the man in his turning point, in the early 1530s, when he goes through the divorce and the marriage to Anne Boleyn and everything that's in Wolf Hall.
So I've gone back and forth, and sometimes I see Henry as a truly intelligent, perceptive man of his age for whom things went wrong and curdled as he got older and sometimes I just see him as a sort of annoying spoiled brat, a kind of Prince Andrew who got to be king.
I haven't made my mind up yet, and maybe I won't ever make my mind up. I think making your mind up can be overrated, and if you don't leave yourself the option and the prerogative to change your mind, you can get yourself into all sorts of trouble.
Here’s the Virtual Programme for the event.
It’s where you can find out about the other writers - journalist and author India Knight, DJ and broadcaster Annie Macmanus, playwright and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, journalist and editor Pandora Sykes, actress and writer Jameela Jamil, and writer and lyricist Nick Hornby.
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