In the role of Pierre Bezukhov: Paul Dano in the current BBC dramatisation © BBC Pictures “Do you know, I myself will be setting off for the 12th time this summer?” Sure, I thought, not believing him for a second. “Ah, so fortunate to have all that ahead of you.” His eyes shone with the benevolence of a gratified apostle. “But I see you are setting off on the Long March.” (I was perhaps on page 100.) “Would this, by any chance, be your First Time?” Indeed it would. “I hope you don’t mind,” said the brigadier, adopting the courtly tone of Count Rostov transplanted to Tunbridge Wells.

I put the book down, trying not to seem put out by the interruption. The voice came from an elderly gent, salt-and-pepper whiskers, country-pub suit, regimental tie not the brown rice type at all unless retired brigadiers were going vegetarian in 1965. “Excuse me young man,” said someone parked opposite. But where I wanted to be was Bald Hills, Moscow, St Petersburg, the sanguinary, smoke-choked fields of battle.Īround the corner from the store was a salad-and-brown-rice lunch bar where you sat at tables of scrubbed pine and toyed with vinegary mounds of alfalfa sprouts.

Every so often I would emerge from the back office cubbyhole to flog a thousand feet of plush curtaining to interior decorators for third-world dictators. I was stuck in a dull vacation job, the only straight in the village that was the soft furnishings department of a big West End department store. Weary of being told by a Cambridge friend that it was the best book ever written, that everything men and women do to each other was its subject, I gave in.

War and peace book