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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm very pleased this week to be joined by Dame Hermione Lee, whose biography of Tom Stoppard, Tom Stoppard Life, is out in paperback now.

Hermione, welcome.

Thank you.

Can I ask what first attracted you to Tom Stoppard as a subject?

I had always enormously liked and admired and enjoyed his plays, but I had absolutely no intention of writing his life.

But as it happened, he asked me. In a quiet sort of offhand way, we've been having a

conversation, we've been having a sort of jokey conversation about biography. I knew him a little

bit, but not very well. And out of that conversation,

he asked me if I'd be interested in writing his life. And I said, yes, absolutely immediately,

without pausing for thought, because it's not the sort of thing you would say no to. And then two

seconds later, I thought, my God, what have I done? This is a living

person, which I had never done before. No, this is a playwright. And I'm not a, you know,

I'm not a theatre person, as it were, although I love the theatre. And also as a man. And my

big books had all been about women writers before then.

So there were a whole set of challenges which turned out to be extremely interesting.

Yeah, I mean, you do say, you know, rather balefully, both towards the beginning and towards the end of your book,

seeded throughout Stoppard's work,

is a very, series of very salty remarks about biographer critics.

...