The book that meant most to me was 'The Wind in the Willows.' It sounds ridiculous, but that was my vision of England.
This is the strange thing about South Africa - for all its corruption and crime, it seems to offer a stimulating sense that anything is possible.
I love Franschhoek, and straight off the plane, I went to the incomparable Quartier Francais, on the main street, for breakfast. This small hotel and restaurant is regularly near the top of every poll for best hotel and restaurant in Africa.
I thought I'd write a massive postmodern novel about Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood, but it turns out they couldn't have met because the first mention of Robin Hood appears 60 years after Richard died.
Historians and journalists always have agendas, but if I want to find out what's going on in South Africa, I read Nadine Gordimer or John Coetzee because they offer novelistic truth.
Someone once pointed out that there are quite a lot of animals in my books, and I'm sure that is something to do with 'The Wind in the Willows.' I must have picked up a rather anthropomorphic view of them.
I always assumed I could never make a living out of literary fiction, and I was right. When I did try, it took four years before being published.
Consciousness - that, to me, is the theme of the modern novel.
I write from what I take to be the realist's point of view, looking at life as it really is - or the way I see it to be.
So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less than human.
It's true that all my novels have been versions of myself to some degree.
I was once asked by Jeremy Paxman what is it about celebrity and said that people these days seem to think a celebrity is someone who has escaped the constraints of ordinary people: that they don't have the same kind of problems, almost as if they're classical gods.
In his later years, Ramakrishna took up residence at the Dakshineswar Kali Temple, from where his radiance extended far, even beyond his death in 1886.
'The Cauliflower' is not strictly a novel, as Barker says in her indispensable afterword.
Nicola Barker is both prodigiously talented and admirably fearless. I have loved her books. But for some time, I had little or no idea what the point of the story of Sri Ramakrishna was. In fact, he was one of the outstanding men of 19th-century India.
The plane approaches Cape Town and, as always, I am astonished by the view of Table Mountain and the surrounding sea. It is so overwhelmingly beautiful that I feel the urge to belong - not necessarily to the people, but to the landscape.
The fascination with Judas has persisted despite the fact that there is no evidence of the hard facts of his life. Even the 'Iscariot' attached to him may be nothing more significant than a corruption of the name of the town from which he came.
Writing 'Judas: The Troubling History of the Renegade Apostle' must have been a difficult task because there are no facts. Judas may quite possibly never have existed at all, and if he did, the Judas kiss may not have happened.
Peter Stanford is a writer on religious and ethical matters. He was for four years editor of the 'Catholic Herald.'
Strangely enough, the legend of John Brown, who was clearly crazy, helped the abolitionist cause and is thought to have precipitated the American Civil War.
