You begin with George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda.

Daniel Deronda is a book which is all about identity and diversity, and the identity issues that affect many of us who have an immigrant background or something of that kind – it’s a bit of a Victorian parable for the modern age. George Eliot was very interested in class as well. Middlemarch includes a substantial proportion of writing about relations between the professions, trade and the landed gentry and the moral and ethical issues that affect those relationships. I think Daniel Deronda is a quite beautiful description of the identity dilemma and what we would today call diversity issues. It explains how conditioning by nurture can confuse someone, as it confused Daniel, who only really found his understanding of his origins when he met the unconfused if vulnerable young woman Mirah.

Have not those diversity issues been transformed since the Victorian era?

Everything changes but plus ça change, plus c’est le meme chose. Diversity has become, rightly, an enormously important issue in our time. But I don’t think the ethics behind diversity have changed very much. Although George Eliot, who was something of a social reformer, was thinking and writing about the changing times in which she lived, the lessons she gives us are an exemplifier we can use when facing similar issues today.

I think ethical issues are a continuum. If you read the court speeches of Cicero, for example, you see exactly the same kind of moral and ethical problems being confronted within his historical matrix as we face today – by analogy at least.

Zadie Smith has written that we should read George Eliot as a moral education, as a way to fit us for society.

Yes, I think she is a moral education. If I have a pupil barrister, or a parliamentary researcher – or even a child – when they get to an appropriate stage I always say to them, ‘If you can find the time please read Daniel Deronda because it is part of the essential bibliography for life.’

The initial Victorian readers, and even the critic F R Leavis, didn’t like the Jewish theme – Leavis said it would be a great novel if those parts were excised.

There isn’t anything to the novel without that. The essential part of the book is about the character’s Jewishness, partly because it is a great storyline. But it couldn’t have been written without the Jewish theme. And don’t forget that at the time George Eliot was writing, pogroms were still taking place against Jews in otherwise civilised parts of the world. In Russia, for example, which had at the time possibly the most civilised aristocracy, and elsewhere.

Your next choice is about a more recent dilemma.

I read The Social History of the Machine Gun fairly recently as the result of a recommendation. And it does exactly what it says on the cover – it describes the development of the machine gun and its impact on warfare, which was dramatic, both within states and between states, and its effect on the fabric of society all over the world. The author speaks about Britain, Europe, India, South Africa. Once again, rather like my choice of Daniel Deronda, although this is a much more recent book, it is a parable for our times, applicable to our own dilemmas. 

No society can prevent the invention of potentially lethal material. What it can do is ensure that it is dealt with within an ethical framework. I think this book shows that the invention of the machine gun and its deployment was rather badly handled and it has lessons for us. What is one of the greatest threats to our time? Nuclear proliferation, which we are still debating how to deal with. I am of an age never to have been called up for active military service and never have had to fight in a war in Europe (there have been no European wars outside the Balkans). One answer to the question of why this is so could be nuclear weapons and the stand-off between the old Soviet Union and Europe. As Professor Bernard Williams once said, nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented. They are an extraordinary invention which has been taken into the civilian world to some advantage in my view.

The lessons of the machine gun apply not only to nuclear non-proliferation but also to the use of nuclear materials for generating electricity. Also to the use, within an ethical framework, of genetically modified crops. In fact to any other similar analogous issue. I think the lesson we learn is the importance of a proportional balance between progress and progress being misused – the balance between a Dr No-type scenario of antisocial use of an invention and the safe use of genetically modified crops to feed millions of hungry people is a very delicate balance. I don’t subscribe to the view that you shouldn’t take the risk of trying to find that balance. And the notion in this book, which is that something that can be hugely lethal can also bring about good, is one that we have to recognise and embrace.

So my lesson from this book is that when something like the machine gun appears on the horizon – and the machine gun changed battlefields because however many men were charging toward you with swords or muskets, it could mow them down before they came anywhere near you – whenever we see that kind of invention we have to look at whether it can be put to good use, rather than simply saying, ‘Let’s ban it.’ It is one of the fundamental disagreements that I have with my own party, the Liberal Democrats – and I’m not the only one in the party with a lot of political experience to take this view – that they indulge in too many calls to ban things.

I’m against banning things if at all possible, because I’m a liberal, but I’m in favour of putting things to imaginative use, or persuading people that they should be used in a way that is safe and effective.