Favourite novelist? 鈥淭here are so many things I like about Milan Kundera鈥檚 books, but I particularly admire his extraordinary insight into the nature of memory. I also love the way he constantly analyses the actions of his characters philosophically.鈥� She has just finished his Ignorance (Faber, 2002).
About to read? Summer in Baden-Baden by the Jewish doctor Leonid Tsypkin (Hamish Hamilton, 2003), both an autobiography and a biography of Dostoyevsky. 鈥淚 admire Dostoyevsky and find it difficult to understand how someone who could write with such sensitivity could also be so anti-Semitic.鈥�
For work? She has just bought Aristotle鈥檚 Nicomachean Ethics (Penguin classics, 2004) and Spinoza鈥檚 Ethics (Oxford, 2000). 鈥淲orking in stem cell research, I thought it would be useful for me to have a better understanding of ethical theory.鈥�
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