A great portrayal of a character it would be all too easy to be misguided enough to trust. Long John Silver creates a business plan to retrieve the treasure at no expense to himself, and when thwarted by less intelligent subordinates, he switches effortlessly to be on the winning side. But I adore Commissario Guido Brunetti, the melancholy, kind, humane, home-loving, intermittently mischievous hero of Donna Leon's novels set in Venice. Whenever I go there, I hope to see him trudging through the mist, vanishing down a narrow calle or glancing up at a sottoportego on the way home to eat risotto with his adored wife Paola.Libby Purves, broadcaster Captain Augustus McCrae He's one of the two dusty fed-up cowboys who run the Hat Creek Cattle Co in Larry McMurtry's classic Lonesome Dove. McCrae is funny and philosophical; he takes his boots off before he roots, and best of all, he never shuts up. Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger) saved us all from an early death and ensured that a misspent childhood was achieved Or Tom Joad from Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Sidney Carton What sort of a list was that? No sign of Sidney Carton, the best drunken antihero of all time, in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.
Germany is still coming to terms with Hitler - and why not? It was only 60 years ago."So, Harris utilises the past to reflect on the present. But, in so doing, he feels no need to make up epochal events - the real ones are stimulating enough. For a novelist, he contends, fact is always more rewarding than fiction "I wouldn't want to invent a prime minister," he says. "Not only is Tony Blair more fascinating, he's more unbelievable than any fictional prime minister."'Archangel' starts on BBC1 at 9pm on Sunday 20 March.
Harris says: "There is this myth that everything is being reinvented every minute. But there has never been a more valuable moment to say, 'If you believe that, you're fooling yourself'. In Russia at the moment, they're merely painting a smile on the face of a corpse It will take at least a generation to work these things out. When you're in the middle of those great long tides of history, you don't recognise what they are. But they're extremely fertile grounds for story-telling."Above all, Archangel warns us to heed the lessons of history. We cannot flee from our own past - we are all prisoners of it. Jon Jones is wrapped up in so many layers, he resembles nothing so much as the Michelin Man He has the right idea.
