Ruth Scurr: preference

Transcript context

…Now a few questions about the Ruth Scurr production function for our final segment. In one of your essays on Finella, which is the house you work in, you said, and I quote, ‘‘I am attracted to calm, order, and symmetry.” If so, why write a biography of Napoleon? Why? Well, he’s attracted to symmetry and order — maybe not calm, but actually, I think he does like calm when he can get it. I’m talking there aesthetically, about my surroundings. I have a real aversion to a lot of clutter around me. One of the reasons I have so many books here in my office is that I made a deal with myself when I bought my first house that I would only have books in it that I was either working on or would want to read if I came awake in the middle of the night, and that’s it. That’s because I didn’t want that sense of being overwhelmed by books and them being out of control, etc. Sometimes people are very surprised when they come to my house, and they’re like, “Where are your books? We thought you’d — ” etc. But there was something about maintaining an orderly environment that was very important. To be fair, in that article, I have caused chaos in Finella in my office in order to have this calm environment at home. You also wrote, and I quote, “When I was an adolescent, Wuthering Heights appealed to me much more than Sense and Sensibility, but now the reverse is true.” How did that happen?…

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