Let’s begin on your book selection with Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which I know to you is one of your great core canon. Will you introduce the book for our readers, and tell us why it’s so important to you?

I guess it’s good that we’re starting with this, because it’s a seriously off-putting book. It’s close to 1,200 pages – a travelogue-history of Yugoslavia.

But it’s quite readable.

It’s incredibly readable. But it seems like such an enormous commitment, doesn’t it, to read a book in excess of a thousand pages. The opportunity-cost of committing to this book seems so huge when you could have got through six other books. So you have to be absolutely assured of its quality. And then there’s the thing of – we were talking about content before – why should you read this book if you’re not interested in Yugoslavia?

I know I had no particular interest in Yugoslavia until I was going to Serbia, Belgrade, for a British Council seminar and they mentioned this book that we might read, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, as preparation for that. As always happens when I’m going to a place, I didn’t read it. I didn’t do the homework. And again as happens when I’ve been to a place, I then became incredibly interested in it. This was, interestingly, during the Milosovic era and one of the wars – although I can’t remember which now. Anyway, I came back and wanted to learn much more about this place I’d been to. I started to read this book, because I’d been to the place it was about, and then I started to realise: My God, this is a major, huge literary masterpiece. It’s without question Rebecca West’s magnum opus.

It’s the account of her trips to Yugoslavia in 1936-8, so in the context of Nazism. What are some of the things that she witnesses and considers?

The first thing to say is that she very cleverly stitches together three trips she made, so the book reads as if it’s one continuous journey – with this character who’s only ever identified as “my husband”. The husband is doing and saying all sorts of things but he’s just “the husband”, and I think it’s great to sustain that for 1,100 pages. She meets a whole load of people – some of whom, in Rebecca West’s great way, she takes this virulent dislike to.

I should say that nothing particularly dramatic happens to her – she’s never caught up in major events in the same way that Kapuściński is – but what is really remarkable, first of all, is that her experiences become an excuse for these huge metaphysical digressions about anything and everything. And also the extraordinary thing is that she’s describing events that she’s seeing at this particular moment in history, yet the book has this incredibly prophetic quality to it. So all the stuff we’re reading that is going on in Bosnia or Serbia, fast forward 60 years and you’re seeing the same scenes being enacted. So she’s reporting about a particular moment, but also she’s tapping deep into some essential and timeless quality of the place.

Peter Englund’s The Beauty and the Sorrow is more conventionally history in the sense that it looks back, but it’s also unconventional in the sense that it’s deconstructing [the First World War] into individual experience – he even describes it as “anti-history” in his foreword.

This is a very recent book – it came out towards the end of 2011. He has uncovered and found out about the lives of 20 different people from different parts of the world – some are combatants, one is a doctor, there’s this cast of characters – and he narrates the war chronologically through their experiences of particular days. This gives a real sense both of people being at the mercy of history – they’re not major actors in what’s going on – but they’re also completely shaping our view of what’s going on. I should say also that each person’s experiences are narrated with novelist-like techniques. The prose is very like that which we encounter in fiction. He also quotes a lot from their diaries.

But then quite an interesting thing happens. We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key. But one of the interesting things about this book, and perhaps one of its shortcomings, is that for us the absolutely key day of the First World War is the 1st of July 1916 – the first day of the Somme, 60,000 casualties – and in the context of this narrative it never happens, because coincidentally none of the people he’s chosen are there. It reconfigures the history of the First World War – it’s subtitled “An Intimate History” – and we’re very much at the mercy of these people’s experiences, but I think there is this slight problem with it.

It reminds me of those documentaries called things like “The Second World War in Colour”. Let’s take a series like “The World at War”, where you have the argument and then people will find the footage to illustrate the argument, the narrative. But when you’re doing a programme like “The Second World War in Colour”, the nature of the war is determined completely by what colour footage is available. Not surprisingly, therefore, since a lot of the Pacific war is filmed in colour by the Americans, that gets rather more emphasis. And some events completely drop out of history, because they’re not in colour.

He said that he wasn’t intending it to be a book about what World War One was, he was intending it to be a book about what World War One was like.

Indeed, that’s right. And there’s a lot of suspense to it as well, because we know the main narrative of the war – which is basically that Germany loses and Britain wins – but within that big narrative people’s individual experiences can often have no relation to it at all.

The book is structured with short chapters, turning the eye of the narrator between these 20 dramatis personae. And as you say, sometimes it feels like a novel in the way it’s written – it sort of exemplifies the tense historic present. Is that novelistic quality to it something which you admire?

I admire that aspect to it, but what I also admire is the way in which it’s not a novel. We can imagine that if it had been a novel, we’re quite familiar with this device where there are maybe six different narrative voices, they’re completely dispersed – one person is in Mesopotamia, the other is in the Arctic – and as the novel goes on we know that these disparate characters and different voices are all at some point going to converge. But that convergence never happens. They remain dispersed, disparate, separate people.

It seems to me that it’s not only a new way of doing history, it’s a new way of giving form to people’s lives without relying on the, I find, increasingly weary conventions of novelisation. But in terms of the prose, the visualisation of scenes and the imaginative rendering of documented events, it’s very novelistic.