‘I teach philosophy, especially ethics,’ he said. ‘This could be a list of books by the great philosophers, but only one of them fits that description. This is because the questions I am most interested in are about how we should live and by what values.’

He said that Plato’s Republic contains a tremendous amount of nonsense  but is an unmissable book nonetheless because of Socrates. ‘He invented the method of doing and teaching philosophy that has never been improved on. His persistent questions forced people to spell out their beliefs more fully and precisely, often unearthing beliefs they hardly knew they had. He would then challenge them with counter-examples, putting pressure on beliefs by pointing out unwelcome consequences they had. This questioning is often both intimidating and liberating. Those of us who teach philosophy aim (not always successfully) for the liberation without the intimidation.’ It is not the answers given to this and the other questions in the book, Glover argues, but the absolutely fundamental challenges of the questions themselves.

Glover went on to discuss Anna Karenina, Lev Tolstoy’s masterpiece.
‘Although he set out to write a moralizing novel showing the evils of Anna’s adultery, his human empathy pushed him in a very different direction, and the reader sees every step towards the final tragedy from Anna’s point of view and sees how difficult – perhaps impossible – any of the alternatives would have been. There is the feeling that if God wrote novels they might be like this.’

What the people Tolstoy admires have in common is a certain kind of seriousness. Anna and Levin are both serious in a way that Vronsky is not, Glover suggests. Part of this is giving thought to what your life is about and how you should live. Part of it is pushing through small talk to express things that really matter to you. ‘This can make Levin, for instance, quite clumsy and gauche on social occasions, but reading Tolstoy makes you see how utterly unimportant this is.’

Primo Levi’s books, the next author Glover chose to discuss, all reflect his experiences in Auschwitz. ‘The Drowned and the Saved is his most reflective book on the Nazi genocide and on his own experiences and what he saw in other people. The chapter on “The Grey Zone” is a brilliant discussion of tragic choices and moral ambiguities. The Nazis made people operate the gas chambers as a way of deferring their own deaths. One of the most evil things about the Nazis was the way they tried to destroy not only their victims’ lives but also their moral integrity, by means of coercive moral dilemmas. “If you cooperate with us in rounding up your fellow Jews, we will take fewer of them than if you do not.” Levi writes about all this with great understanding of the pressures and how difficult they were to resist.’ He retains moral standards by which to judge people, but without glib moralizing, says Glover. ‘Few people were either pure saints or pure villains. Those of us without his experience are rightly reluctant to criticise people who failed tests we have not had to face. But because Levi had experienced what he describes, his careful discriminations between degrees of good and bad in the “grey zone” have great authority.’

Then Glover chose to discuss The Kennedy tapes. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the world came the closest it has been to nuclear war. Khrushchev secretly installed missiles in Cuba, and when American spy planes spotted them Kennedy saw that American public opinion would not stand for a nuclear threat so close and possibly under Castro’s control. Should the United States bomb the missile sites in Cuba, or might that lead to Soviet retaliation? Would anything less lead to their removal?

Amazingly, and unknown to most participants, the meetings of the committee set up to decide policy were taped, as were many other meetings at the White House. ‘In human history, no other crisis of comparable gravity has been documented from the inside in this way,’ Glover explained.

‘Several things stand out. One is the degree of pressure from some military people to go for the “tough” policy of bombing Cuba, and the strength it needed to resist it.
Another is that Kennedy himself and a few members of his administration had been to a session put on by scientists and others spelling out just what nuclear war would be like. (After the session, Kennedy had said, “And we call ourselves the human race.”) Notably, while others were prepared to risk nuclear war by bombing Cuba, those who had been present at this session were not.’

What Glover finds especially interesting is that Kennedy deceived the American people by concealing the concession he had to make in the secret part of the negotiations. By removing US missiles in Turkey (as close to the Soviet Union as Cuba is to America), Kennedy gave Khrushchev something to justify to Soviet colleagues his withdrawal of the Cuban missiles. This concession might have been too much for American public opinion. ‘If so, this is a case of an apparently “immoral” act of deception being the right thing to do. It raises questions about the absolute desirability of transparency and honesty in politics,’ he says.

In discussing Kay Jamison’s book, An Unquiet Mind, with me, Glover changed direction abruptly.  Kay Redfield Jamison is a psychologist who has co-authored the major psychiatric textbook on manic depression. It authoritatively covers every aspect of the science, from genetics to pharmacology, and also has chapters on the links with creativity and on what the illness feels like. The chapters on the subjective experience are enriched with vivid quotations from patients. In her autobiography, An Unquiet Mind, Kay Jamison came out as not only an expert on the illness but also someone who has it. ‘The power of her book comes from her understanding it both scientifically and from the inside,’ Glover says. ‘She describes the sheer awfulness of the periods of depression and (perhaps less convincingly, anyway as a point about people in general) the richness of the high periods. She brings out the importance of both medication and psychotherapy in helping people with the disorder. And she has interesting thoughts on the way her identity is bound up with the illness.’

She asks the quite fundamental question of whether she would rather not have had manic depression. She answers unequivocally that, without modern medication, the depression would be so terrible that she would much prefer not to have the illness. But she lives in a time when the medication is available, and her answer is that she is not sorry to have manic depression. She is acutely aware of its costs, but thinks that it has given her life a certain emotional resonance she would be sorry to be without. ‘Many with the illness might disagree. But the book, and the life it describes, is a remarkable example of how – as her mother once put it – it matters not only what cards life has dealt you, but also how you play them.’

Walters not only crushes the Weisenthal myth but he also had a few things to say about Odessa, the group of former SS men made famous by Frederick Forsyth’s book  The Odessa File and assumed by many to be an actual organisation.  ‘The problem with Odessa, which stands for Organisation of Former SS Associates,’ he said,  ‘Is that if you’d been in the SS and were trying not to get hunted you’re not going to call your organisation that, are you? So, basically, it’s bollocks. But  because of his book the myth persists. A man called Willhelm Hoettl fed the story to Simon Weisenthal [the famous Nazi hunter] who fed it to Anthony Terry at the Sunday Times where Forsyth picked it up and all these people put their spin on it.’  Walters thinks it’s probably true that there were various groups of former SS people and perhaps even one called Odessa in Southern Germany, but the ball has been tampered with so many times and it now lodges deep in the imagination of anyone trying to think about Nazis in the post-war period.

But although there were all kinds of myths that grew up around the hunt for the world’s biggest Nazis, the true stories are even more bizarre. Walters told me this surreal story:
Isser Harel was head of Mossad [the Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations] in the early 1950s when Mossad found, from the stories of a half-blind German Jew, that Adolf Eichmann was living in Buenos Aires. Mossad went to have a look at the house and decided there was no way he lives in this little bungalow. ‘But the half-blind Jew, Lothar Hermann, persists, and Mossad eventually collected enough information to say that he in fact is living in this crappy little house – actually, another crappy little house – in Buenos Aires, and they staged their audacious, cack-handed, brilliant kidnap of Eichmann off the street in Buenos Aires and took him back to Israel to face trial and he was hanged in 1962,’ Walters explained. ‘People say that Harel is trying to exculpate himself for dragging his feet on Eichmann, but in the early 1950s Israel had enough enemies on its doorstep to be worrying about Eichmann and it was not easy for them to mount this operation. The idea that they could have done it straight away at that time is just silly. In any case, Eichmann wasn’t a household name until after his trial, so it wasn’t as if this was a big Nazi name then. This book shows that Simon Weisenthal, despite his claims, was not involved in the kidnap or search to the extent that he says he was.’

Walters insists that Weisenthal is, in essence, a liar. ‘He’s just not this secular saint that everyone says he is. His memoirs all contradict each other and are at odds with the rest of the evidence,’ he says. ‘The Weisenthal Centre claims 1100 Nazi scalps, but the true figure is about 10. The Centre bought his name in the 1970s and is basically an Israeli brand-builder fighting anti-Semitism.’

Though he challenges the hagiographic stories about Simon Weisenthal, Walters is nonetheless appalled that the Allies failed to prosecute the thousands of Nazis who went on the run after the war. ‘It is disgraceful that if we thought it was a criminal regime we didn’t go on to prosecute the 80,000 people who committed murders and greater crimes. Nazi Hunting basically stopped after 1948 when about 5% of them had been caught, if that,’ Walters says. ‘Sure, some Nazis were useful to use against the Soviets in the Cold War, but the extent of it and the cynicism with which things were not done is disgusting. I say this without being naïve.’

The logo on the front of my first Faith book, The Bad News Bible, was ‘Courage Without Equal. Truth Without Bullshit. Vodka Without Tonic.’ The covers were kind of 70s and James Bond-ish and I thought of Faith as a female James Bond, hiding her complexity with grit. My editor for the Faith books, Rosie de Courcy told me that the secret to a good character is that he or she should represent the writer’s fantasy self so that you end up writing a fantasy autobiography. The art of good thriller writing, she said, was to let the reader know that an axe is hanging over our hero’s head but not to tell them when it’s going to fall. She says you have to ‘show not tell’ and that your hero or heroine can be as vile as you like as long as there’s one undeniably good thing about them – Scarlett O’Hara, Rosie points out, loved her mother and father. I tried to follow Rosie’s advice but I do always get led astray by my characters and drawn into their inner lives and motivations, wrapped up in the psychological drama. My Faith books always have a big emotional event around which the plot is constructed – the death of a close friend, falling in love, an ex-lover on the prowl, a resurrected relative, the safety of a child. But then I read a Dan Brown book and see that his success lies in entirely ignoring characterisation for a tight plot constructed around an inanimate object.

This week, for The Browser, I interviewed thriller writer James Twining and he had five key rules that he felt must be followed to come up with the perfect thriller – Dan Brown’s core concept is one of them. If only I’d known… First, Twining says, you’ve got to have a fantastic central character, like James Bond: ‘What Fleming does is he has a central character who’s totally compelling – a fantasy figure who men want to be like and women want to sleep with. He’s sophisticated and charming with a slight brutality. It dates a bit now some of that, the language and the racial depictions perhaps don’t work so well. But you’d have to struggle to look at literary fiction over the past 50 years and come up with a character who has really inhabited the popular consciousness.’ Another classic character is Sam Spade in the Maltese Falcon. You can’t think about Sam Spade without thinking of Humphrey Bogard, Twining reminded me. Ian Fleming, of course, has an immediately recognisable writing style and this is obviously fairly key and perhaps the most difficult thing for anyone considering writing a thriller to achieve. In some ways you either have a good writing style or you don’t. This might not be something that can be learnt. You also, as noted above, need the action to revolve round an inanimate object that provides motivation for the human characters.

Twining again: ‘The Maltese Falcon itself is this artefact covered in jewels that has been painted black to disguise it, but it’s a complete mcguffin! It doesn’t actually matter at all, except to provide motivation for the characters. I’ve used this device in my new book about the illicit trade in antiquities – I’ve used an ivory mask that really was found in London and had been dug up in Italy. I mean, think of Pulp Fiction. We never do find out what’s in the bloody briefcase. You could say it’s a cop out, but it’s no more of a cop out than your best friend dying and having to find out who the murderer is.You need something to get the story in motion.’ Another thing that Twining suggests is key is to have some element of reality in your novel so that readers can think; ‘Ooh, I never knew that.’ ‘I think Dan Brown’s books are often like a lecture embedded in a chase story,’ Twining told me. Another example of this is Frederick Forsyth’s Day of The Jackal: ‘This has a real historical character, General Charles De Gaulle. It’s an amazing trick really because we all know De Gaulle wasn’t assassinated, but the whole way along we’re thinking: ‘Shit! Is he going to die!’ ‘Silence of the Lambs also has elements of reality in it. Thomas Harris has based Lector on Ed Greene, a serial killer who robbed graves and killed woman in order to flay the corpses for their skins. Greene was also the basis for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Norman Bates in Psycho. He also uses the real murderer Garry Ridgeway who dumped women’s bodies with objects inside them.’

In Day of the Jackal Forsyth uses another of the devices that Twining recognises as key in that he actually breaks a news story. Forsyth in this book exposed the practise of applying for passports in the name of dead children. ‘People would go to graveyards and look for the graves of children. The government actually had to change the law on the basis of his research,’ Twining said. Thomas Harris does the same in Silence of the Lambs: ‘Like Forsyth in Day of the Jackal, Harris breaks a story in that he popularised or exposed the workings of the FBI’s criminal profiling unit. He put them on the map. Nowadays they are always in any crime drama.’ So, James Twining and I concluded between us that to write a good thriller you need: a brilliant central character, a recognisable writing style (Fleming has his distinctive short sentences and muscularity), some link to reality like a real event, character or detailed research, an inanimate object around which the human story revolves, and a news story that breaks as a result of the novel. Easy.

I am one of the editors of the books section of The Browser, where famous people recommend books, so I read a lot of books myself. One of the books recommended by David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is by an American psychologist called Jonathan Haidt. The book is called The Happiness Hypothesis. I’ve already sent it to all my friends, I find it so compelling. One of the things it touches on (in passing) is the issue of the “life story”. Haidt quotes another psychologist called McAdams saying that as human beings we can’t stop ourselves from “creating an evolving story that integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present and anticipated future into a coherent and vitalizing life myth.” Apparently this is a vital part of our personality. And when bad things happen, if we can make sense of them within our life story (myth), then we can cope with them, and even grow stronger because of them.

I know nothing about psychology so I won’t try to come to any broader conclusions than that (or compare it to anything Freud said on the subject). But that as a person I’m continually writing stories in my head, I can certainly vouch for that. It may also explain why memoir writing, as a genre, has completely taken off in the past 15 years. It’s supposedly still one of the hottest areas in the publishing industry. It’s not just me - everybody just loves to write about themselves.

Fortuitously, as part of my work for The Browser, I interviewed the American author and humorist, Calvin Trillin recently (Trillin, by the way, despite not remotely resembling an economist, has written by far the most compelling account of the cause of the financial crisis to date . And he chose, as his topic, memoirs. I’ve put the link at the bottom. For those of you, like me, who do want to write the stories of their lives, it has some interesting pointers. He chose five memoirs that he enjoyed, and you probably won’t have heard of a single one of the authors. And that’s the point, a memoir doesn’t have to be about a famous person. It’s just about someone recounting their experience in an authentic manner. Of course the experience they recount tends to be horrible, and the genre is sometimes called the “misery memoir”. A Million Little Pieces, the memoir by the drug addict (which Trillin discusses) in the US at least has become the rule, not the exception: there’s not much a market for happy memoirs (though obviously not all of them turn out to be fake). Which ties in perfectly with what the psychologist Haidt was saying: that we are writing these stories partly to deal with and make sense of trauma. Not that you have to launch your career as a best-selling author to get the benefits. You don’t even need to become a full-blown wannabe writer to work trauma out of your system by writing. You can just write for yourself, at home. But Haidt has some pointers on this. It’s not just letting off steam type of writing, it’s not just about getting the trauma off your chest. It’s about making sense of what happened in your writing. Making it part of your story. Only then does it help. Trauma is partly why I write, I think.

This was my first article for The Times (of London), back in 2003. Overall though, I don’t think the book I eventually write is going to be depressing. Also, while I’ve billed it as the story of my life, it’s actually going to be a three-generational thing – about my grandmother (a beautiful Austrian Jewish woman who lived in Constantinople and Vienna), my mother (a socialite who met Stalin in Moscow after World War II and danced with Walter Cronkite, the American newsreader at embassy parties), and only lastly myself. As I’ve got complete control over my life myth, and can invest it with my own meaning, I’ve decided the unifying theme I am going to embrace is glamour. (On which topic, by the way, you can read lifestyle guru Helena Frith Powell at The Browser too. Read Calvin Trillin on Memoirs.

PS, Note to Self. Remember to ask Jonathan Haidt: when does interpretation of life myth turn into delusion?

One of the first interviews I did was with Mary Kaldor of the London School of Economics and she was talking about War. When someone is the world’s leading expert in something they can impart a vast amount of knowledge in a short period of time. It had never occurred to me before that there are ‘theories of war’, although, of course, there must be. She talked about Clausewitz, who fought in the Napoleonic wars, and about his theory that unless you put absolutely everything into a war and are prepared to suffer enormous losses you can never win. She explained that war has changed since the Balkans and that war is now invariably among the people. While once people fought to protect the women and children, it is now the women and children who are often attacked. War is now fought more in the way that drug dealers compete for territory in inner cities. She also said that the Americans eventually started doing the right thing in Iraq and Afghanistan, trying to protect civilians rather than defeat an enemy. This change actually happened under Bush, who finally hired incredibly intelligent generals, though Obama will likely get the credit.

I have learnt the name of one of the main people responsible for the genocide in Rwanda - Theoneste Bagosora. It is astonishing that someone guilty of such huge crimes against humanity is so internationally unknown.

Lord Robert Skidelsky explained that the economists Reagan and Thatcher followed did not believe that people and their lives and choices are unpredictable. They thought of the economy as a pendulum that might swing right or left but that ends up in the middle. This, said Skidelsky, a champion of Keynsian economic theory, does not take people and their viscissitudes into account.

Dr Vivette Glover of Imperial College London, described the findings of her research on human fetuses. She has discovered that stress during pregnancy adversely affects the unborn child more than post-natal stress or depression. Stressed mothers give birth to smaller babies and smaller babies are vastly more likely to suffer from coronary heart disease later in life. Stressed mothers also give birth to children more likely to have ADHD, cognitive delay and anxiety, all factors that can lead to criminal activity in the adult. I was stunned by the facts but perhaps not by the message – supporting pregnant women matters.

I learnt a lot about the psychology of George W Bush from Jacob Weisberg of Slate Magazine. He explained what it must have been like being the son of the golden child of the Bush family, the athlete, the businessman, the President. He detailed the pressures of the dynasty to me and how George W battled against his father and his brother, how jealous and angry he became, how much he wanted his father’s love and approval. I almost ended up feeling sorry for him, but then, hearing about the cruel nicknames he made up for those close to him, my sympathy waned.

Dr Michael Nicholson explained that Solzhenitsyn did not start out with A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich and then start writing longer and longer tomes about Russia as he aged. He had worked on lots of the big tomes, including Gulag Archipelago, long before he wrote A Day In The Life. The world has got the chronology wrong. He also said that archives prove the actual Politburo sat around discussing what to do about Solzhenitsyn – being a writer really matters in Russia in a way it just doesn’t in the West.

Guy Walters, who is an expert on the Nazi Hunters and has written a book about them, told me that Simon Weisenthal is a liar who was much less involved in the capture of key Nazis than he pretends.

Sung J Woo told me that there are more Chinese restaurants in America than McDonalds, Burger King and Wendy put together and that the egg roll is now as American as apple pie.

Psychoanalyst David Bell explained that Freud did not discover the unconscious – poets and writers had always known that we could be motivated by ideas that were not consciously known to us. Freud captures the unconscious within an explanatory model that has a theoretical structure. So, the model of the mind shows that not only are parts of the mind unconscious but there are parts of the mind that are held in the unconscious. This is called the dynamic unconscious and means that we actively repress things we don’t want to know about.

From talking to Hippo lover Karen Paolillo, I learnt that hippos only attack when they are afraid.

Susan Quilliam, who updated The Joy of Sex, tells us that sex is for life – it doesn’t stop at menopause.

Jeffrey Archer has sold 250 million books and says what makes a book immortal is a good story, not always literary prowess.

Contrary to popular belief, people who commit suicide do not usually leave a note (Johanna Reiss on Suicide).

Plato and Aristotle were already arguing about political spin, so we can’t blame it all on Alastair Campbell (David Greenberg on Spin).

Yosri Fouda of Al Jazeera, an intrepid reporter and the world’s leading expert on 9/11, told me that America had expected the attacks and had not done enough to prevent them. He thinks the 9/11 Commission Report is a laughable disgrace.

Sara Wheeler recommended a book about a young man from Togo who went native with the Inuit in Greenland in the 1960s – she says it’s the best book ever written on Greenland and it sounds like it.

Of course, there are a lot more amazing things contained in the Browser Five Books interviews. We hope you will go to the Browser website to find out more.