Thanks for downloading a good read.

You can find more information on all the BBC downloads at BBC.co.uk slash radio four.

Hello, welcome. With me today, the novelist Tracy Chevalier,

whose seven works of fiction include most famously,

Girl with a Pearl Earring, filmed with Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth,

and most recently The Last Runaway.

With Tracy, the historian Neil Ferguson, author of 14 books, his latest being this autumn's

Kissinger, Volume 1, The Idealist, presenter of TV documentaries on Among Much Else, the British

Empire, the American Empire and China, and Lawrence A. Tish Professor of History at Harvard University.

Tracy, would you start us off with your good read?

Sure. I have chosen Muriel Sparks, the driver's seat.

And the reason I chose it was years ago I read what I think of as her young women in publishing

books, Girls of Slender Means and Far Cry from Kensington.

And they're, I don't really remember them.

I just remember them being kind of fluffy and slight.

And now fluffy is the last adjective I'd use for Muriel Spark.

More recently I read Pr and Miss Jean Brody, and then, but this, I put those all in a

different category.

This summer, my husband read The Ballad of Peckham Rye and handed it to me and said, you

have got to read this.

And I thought, fantastic, it's only like 100 pages long.

I wasn't really into reading big tones.

...