Ruth Scurr: evaluation

Transcript context

…Coleridge, Hardy, Kipling, Newton, Churchill, someone else? Well, Hardy — I don’t think we’d understand him better. I’ve been to Hardy’s Cottage. I’ve seen the remnants there of what must have been his garden. I think what you have — it is a very interesting question, but the point here is that the method, the idea of doing it this way, came from the material, not the other way around. So it’s difficult for me because I didn’t . . . Actually, someone asked me the same question about my Aubrey book. They said, “OK. If you were going to imagine a diary based on the historical evidence for another figure, who would that be?” And I was just like, “Well, I can’t answer that because I invented that approach to fit Aubrey. ” Actually, even now with Napoleon, I think if you said to me, “Well, your next book has to be in the same mode; you’ll have to do another figure, and it has to be through their gardens,” I would really struggle with that. Now, in most of these conversations, we have a middle segment called “Underrated vs. Overrated.” Are you ready for some of that?…

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