What was the first book to make an impression on you?

The Bridge of St Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder.

What was your favourite book as a child?

Jules Verne: Around the World in 80 Days; it has infected me with a life-long love of travel.

And what is your favourite book or books now?

The one I happen to be reading until I reach page ten.

What is your favourite quotation?

John Donne: “No man is an island ... Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind, And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Who is your favourite fictional character?

Does Hamlet qualify?

Who is the most under-rated Irish author?

To be honest I do not know Irish literature in depth, but until a few years ago Colm Tóibín.

Which do you prefer – ebooks or the traditional print version?

Had Gutenberg discovered printing after ebooks, the whole world would rush to buy this extraordinary new invention and be overcome by the sensation of holding something so beautiful in their hands.

What is the most beautiful book you own?

A single page of illuminated manuscript by the Circle of Jean Pichore of Paris, circa 1500, depicting King David.

Where and how do you write?

In my study, in a secluded part of Regent’s Park, London from where I can see the crown of beautiful trees, green shrubbery in front of the window, and flowers on the window sill changing with the seasons. How do I write? Slowly.

What book changed the way you think about fiction?

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

What is the most research you have done for a book?

Since for 40 years I was a medical academic, more prolific with some 500 publications than Barbara Cartland, it has to be a textbook I have co-edited on diseases of the nervous system: with two heavy volumes (definitely not bedtime reading) of more than 2,300 pages. After retirement, when I reinvented myself as an author, it was my first book, Parallel Lines, published by Arcadia Books London in 2006; this has reached four reprints, translated into Hungarian, and now into Italian. It is the story of a childhood journey which at the age of five I made with my parents from a sleepy provincial town in Hungary to the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen in 1944-45. To write this book 60 years later I made the same journey, visiting archives and people in several countries in Europe and in the USA.

What book influenced you the most?

The Old Testament.

What book would you give to a friend’s child on their 18th birthday?

Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir.

What book do you wish you had read when you were young?

Any book by Dostoyevsky.

What advice would you give to an aspiring author?

Keep at it, but do not give up the day job.

What weight do you give reviews?

Do they still exist? A TV interview of eight minutes on BBC sold more copies of my first book than all the reviews in the Observer, Sunday Times, Independent, etc.

Where do you see the publishing industry going?

To the wall.

What writing trends have struck you lately?

The rise and rise of the “ethnic” novel.

What lessons have you learned about life from reading?

That life is a complex business.

What has being a writer taught you?

A reverence for words.

Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?

For a lively evening, a couple of Irish writers: Wilde, Beckett, Joyce, Edna O’Brien. For a quiet evening with few words and long pauses: Harold Pinter.

What is the funniest scene you’ve read?

Any vignette from George Mikes's How to be an Alien in which he tells us more about the English than they know about themselves.

What is your favourite word?

And.

If you were to write a historical novel, which event or figure would be your subject?

Imre Nagy, a Hungarian Communist leader who became the figurehead of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, and after the Soviet invasion, he was given asylum at the Yugoslav embassy, but despite a guarantee of safe conduct, he was arrested and executed by the Communist government.

Peter Lantos is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and was an internationally known clinical neuroscientist who has now retired from a chair at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. His childhood memoir, Parallel Lines, is published by Arcadia Books. Closed Horizon, published in 2012, was his first novel. He is currently writing a play based on the love affair between the French painter, James (Jacques) Tissot, and an Irish Catholic divorcee with an illegitimate child, in the setting of Victorian high society.

peter-lantos.com