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Hello, welcome with me today, the actor, director, writer David Morrissey,

seen most recently on television in the hit US series Extant with Halliberry

and on stage starring in Martin McDonner's Hangman

at the Royal Court Theatre. With David, the author Julia Blackburn, whose books include two novels

and ten non-fiction works among the latter threads The Delicate Life of John Crask published earlier

this year. Julia, why don't you start us off with your

choice of a good read? Yes, I've chosen the Salinger, J.D. Salinger's short stories with a wonderful

title for Esme with Love and Squalor. And this was a book I read when I was a teenager and realized

when I looked at it again that I'd forgotten everything

except for the lovely title and the other title of one of the other stories, which is the one

of a good day for banana fish. And we even had a kind of family joke of saying if it was raining

that it was a good day for banana fish. I think it's a perfect day for banana fish. You're

underestimating it. Yes, it's a perfect day for banana fish. You're underestimating it.

Yes, it's a perfect day for banana fish, and we used to use it when it was raining.

So I've gone back to those stories, partly because of reading a bit about Salinger and his life,

and how in 1944 he was part of the D-Day Crossing.

He went over with a platoon of Americans, fellow Americans.

3,100 of them crossed over and 500 actually reached Buchenwald, so that the rest of them were just decimated on the way.

But the bit that I found so touching is that going over, doing the D-Day crossings, he had the first six chapters of

Catcher in the Rye in his knapsack and was working on it as a way of keeping sane. And then when

he got back, one of the first stories he did was for Esme with Love and Squalor, which is probably

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