<p>I love writers with a spiritual sense, writers who write because they feel there is something out there bigger than themselves, bigger even than the art they produce. I think the greatest writers all had this sense and that it is why there are such things as ‘great’ books. Such writers find the eternal in the ephemeral, the infinite in the mundane. This is why, among literary writers, I love Flannery O’Conner and Salinger and Conrad and Charles Williams and Francoise Mauriac and Camus and Dostoyevsky and especially Shakespeare. Among history writers, Christopher Dawson, Henri Daniel-Ropes, Tibor Szamuely and (the almost unknown) Julius Meier-Graefe can keep me up into the wee hours reading. As do philosopers like Leszek Kolakowski, Phillip Reiff, Hannah Arendt, Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, and the theologians Romano Guardini, Karl Rahner and Henri De Lubac. In science, I’ll read anything by John Polkinghorne and David Berlinski. Then, from the sublime to the near-sublime, there are the mystery writers I love: Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Alan Bradley (his Flavia de Luce books are a marvel), Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey, and Dorothy Sayers.</p>
