Tom
Payne read Classics at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. For four years he was
deputy literary editor of the Daily Telegraph. He is
the author of Fame: What the
Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity (Picador, October 26, 2010). He
looks at fame through the lens of classical literature, and sees that
throughout time, we have exalted the famous, only to cut them down, as if they
were ritual sacrifice. Celebrity is perilous, and that's what we like.
On your nightstand now:
I teach in a school, and I write book reviews, so that I don't read much for myself. But David Renwick's The Bridge awaits me, and I've hinted that I want Neil Macgregor's A History of the World in 100 Objects for Christmas.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I read Richard Adams's bunny epic, Watership Down, three times as a boy. It really is an epic--the plot is straight from Virgil, with fluffier characters.
Your top five authors:
Georges Perec, Fyodor Dostoyevksy, Catullus, Euripides, Byron. (Shakespeare is implicit in everyone's answer, I'm sure, so he can give his spot to someone else.)
Book you've faked reading:
I have a big gap in my head where a lot of 19th-century novels should be. In discussions of Dickens, I look thoughtful, and most often have to confess.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Life, A User's Manual by Georges Perec. It's a novel that is based entirely around the objects in a condemned Paris apartment block, and looks rambling enough to give you a view of the whole world; and it has this extraordinary structure.
Book you've bought for the cover:
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. The edition I had had the first page on the cover, which is all about buying If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. And so I did.
Book that changed your life:
The Odyssey keeps on making me check how my life is going, so it's still doing its job. I remember hearing a line when a version was read to me in class: "Odysseus, always wanting to know all there was to know...." It ain't Homer, but it's beautiful.
Favorite line from a book:
At the moment it's from Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth says, "I expected at least that the pigs were got into the garden, and here is nothing but Lady Catherine and her daughter!" Her wit tends to be so elegant, but this insult is bracingly straightforward.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Probably Crime and Punishment. It's one of those stories with only one possible ending, and a world of responses on the way.