Your first choice is In the Name of Honor by Mukhtar Mai.

It’s by this amazing woman, though it’s an ‘as told to’ book written by a French journalist working through an interpreter. She talked to her about how she became known around the world because of this episode where she was raped, essentially at the order of a village council in Pakistan because one of the local big families said her brother, who I don’t think was even a teenager, had allegedly assaulted one of their daughters. In fact, he had only been talking to her. But it escalated and at the end of the day, because that was an assault on the honour of this family, they insisted on getting their own back.

This was an official punishment?

Well, it’s difficult, because there are these village councils which are not empowered to do this, but they do…

They do it anyway?

They sort of grow out of a tradition where they were the government, though they’re not any more. Anyway, what’s amazing is that it was horrible, obviously, and she spent a week locked away in her house, but then, instead of what normally happens in these circumstances, which is that the woman just retreats in shame, the village mullah, rather than letting them get away with it, said in Friday mosque that this was a wrong. So then the police felt they had to do something about it and they actually interviewed her.

While they tried to get her to cover it up, it very swiftly snowballed and she was at the centre of this international incident and the people who did it were prosecuted, which doesn’t happen very often. Then it was appealed, and now it’s a mess and still hasn’t been decided by the supreme court of Pakistan, but the key thing is that in doing this she drew attention to the possibility that instead of retreating in shame you should shame the people who did it. Because it drew international attention she got support from around the world and she got money and won prizes and started a centre which has two schools, a girls school and a boys school, though she herself is not literate.

She is an amazing woman, who, instead of doing what she was expected to do, resisted, and as a result women contacted her from all over Pakistan and she tries to support them. She argues against these honour killings and assaults but also for the human rights and the dignity of women in Pakistan.

Why have you chosen it particularly now?

She is one of my heroes and this is a book about how someone who grasps dignity, which is a form of honour based in our humanity, can resist the world of the negative side of honour, where women are punished because they are pawns in a game of honour between men.

Tell me about Frank Henderson Stewart's book, Honor.

This is a very different kind of book. Frank Henderson Stewart is a very distinguished scholar, now retired, an expert on the ancient Near East, but he thought deeply about honour. He read ancient texts and legal documents because, as you know, honour is a legal concept in German law and you can seek to have your honour protected in various ways – it’s sort of what they have instead of libel. Analysing and thinking deeply about it, he tries to understand how honour developed, and it was he who led me to see the core thought, which is that honour is an entitlement to respect, and that what honour codes do is say how you get to be entitled to respect. I disagree with a lot of what he says – in particular that he wants to give up on honour because it has such negative connotations: I think it needs reform as a concept – but I think it’s a very lovely piece of scholarly analysis.

How would you reform honour?

Well, reform of honour… Because honour involves entitlement to respect created by codes, what reform you need depends on the code with which it’s associated. So, in terms of the honour-killing code, I think the obvious immediate reform is to get people to see that the honourable thing is to protect women in these circumstances and not to assault them and kill them, but to attach honour to protecting these women rather than to attach it to harming them.

That’s assuming a lot of human nature though, isn’t it?

The reason why I think this can happen is because of the historical fact that over and over again is has happened. Nobody would have predicted in England in 1839 when the Duke of Wellington fought his duel that by 1850 that kind of thing would seem ridiculous. At the time, while the particular duel he engaged in was thought to be troublesome in various ways, it wasn’t ridiculous.

Why did he fight a duel?

He was fighting because someone else in the House of Lords had accused him of giving money to Kings College London in order to conceal the fact that he was sympathetic to Catholics. It was a scandalously irresponsible allegation but he felt his honour was at stake. But within a generation, if you challenged someone to a duel people mocked you and thought it was funny. Honour killings occurred in Italy well into the 20th century and they don’t occur there any more, so I do think it’s possible to reform these things because we have reformed them, and the honour-killing codes are in need of reform as fast as we can do it.

Moral Capital.

This is another beautiful piece of scholarship by an eminent historian, but you don’t have to be an academic to read it.