WHAT BOOK would biographer Hugo Vickers take to a desert island?

 …are you reading now?    

For a long time I was a Proustian who had never read Proust, although I first read about him when I was 16 — pronouncing him ‘Prowst’ as opposed to ‘Proost’ — in connection with Gladys Deacon, the subject of my latest biography, of whom he was an admirer. I went to the school library and looked her up in George D Painter’s 1959 biography of Proust.

I have since read that biography, met several survivors who had known him, and even had original letters from him in my possession. I collected — and contributed to — the 21 volumes of his letters edited by Professor Philip Kolb.

At an auction in 1980, I bid successfully for a job lot unseen. In it was an original first edition of Du Cote De Chez Swann (effectively, I paid 25p) along with a limited edition 1949 set bound in blue leather, with illustrations by Philippe Jullian (25p for each of them, too).

In 1981, I resolved to read one volume a month and started well, until Prince Charles got engaged and life became hectic. I am now listening to it on tape — unexpurgated, 170 hours — with the books to hand. I am well into book five.

…would you take to a desert island?

A. G. Macdonell’s satirical interwar novel England, Their England — I have read it so many times. It is funny and perceptive and, amidst the palm trees, it would remind me of all that I love about this country.

Macdonell evokes the spirit of the English countryside, where Saxon church towers strike the hour, magpies flap lazily over meadows, there are flickering hazes, sheep bells tinkle, and you hear the click of cricket bat on ball — an unchanging world where, of the 24 families in the novel who sent bowmen to Agincourt from the village of Eynesbury St Clement, 18 of the same names appeared on the Great War memorial.

…would you like to take to a desert island? 

A. G. Macdonell’s satirical interwar novel England, Their England — I have read it so many times. It is funny and perceptive and, amidst the palm trees, it would remind me of all that I love about this country.

Macdonell evokes the spirit of the English countryside, where Saxon church towers strike the hour, magpies flap lazily over meadows, there are flickering hazes, sheep bells tinkle, and you hear the click of cricket bat on ball — an unchanging world where, of the 24 families in the novel who sent bowmen to Agincourt from the village of Eynesbury St Clement, 18 of the same names appeared on the Great War memorial.

…first gave you the reading bug?

As a child in the Fifties, there were superb serials of great stories on black-and-white television on Sunday evenings.

I wanted to know more. Thus I read Dickens — Oliver Twist (right), Great Expectations and The Old Curiosity Shop. I was terrified by an adaptation of Jane Eyre, loved Wuthering Heights, and then I found Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca — and read all of them at prep school before I was 12.

…left you cold?  

I had admired Kenneth Rose as a biographer, notably of George V. I was aware that he was keeping a diary and it was suggested that he might be the Samuel Pepys of his generation. No! Far from it.

A diarist should reveal something of his inner self, and in these diaries, Rose keeps his mask firmly in place. The diaries themselves are a damp squib.

I readily confess that I was angered to find that things I had told him about my biography of the Queen Mother are published here. I went to considerable lengths not to make my views known.

Rose did not reveal what he said in order to winkle these indiscretions from me. Nor am I the only person who trusted him as a friend, only to find themselves stitched up.

• Cecil Beaton: The Authorised Biography by Hugo Vickers is published this month by Hodder at £14.99. The Sphinx, his biography of Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough, is also out in hardback, published by Hodder at £25.