Hermione Lee Interviewed by Nicolette Jones

Acclaimed literary biographer Professor Dame Hermione Lee talks about the life of one of our greatest playwrights Tom Stoppard.

Lee used unprecedented access to private papers, diaries, and letters, interviews with the likes of Felicity Kendal, John Boorman, Trevor Nunn and Steven Spielberg, and long conversations with Stoppard himself to draw a unique portrait of the man. She looks at his Czech origins and Indian childhood, the schools he went to, and the plays and films he wrote. It tells much about a complex, elusive and private man, but a man Lee says retains a fascinating mystery of unknowability.

Lee is a retired professor of English literature and a former president of Wolfson College. Her published biographies include Virginia Woolf and Penelope Fitzgerald, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. here she talks to writer, journalist and broadcaster Nicolette Jones.