Jeffrey Archer

I recently attended the Young Dancer of the Year competition at the Royal Opera House, organised by the formidable Jacquie Brunjes. Sixteen young girls and boys aged 14 to 16 who had won a place in the final, all strutted their stuff in the hope of becoming the eventual winner. I watched each performance with a keen amateur eye, and selected my three to be awarded prizes, and not one of them made it to the final. Dame Arlene Phillips selected Cooper Filby, and I asked her afterwards if he had a chance of making it on to the professional stage. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘The standard of young dancers in Britain today has never been higher and Cooper can look forward to a promising career.’ I returned home and switched on the television to see Vladimir Putin on the early evening news.

This last week, in India, I visited six cities in seven days: Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Calcutta and New Delhi. This is my 11th trip to India and from the very beginning the signs were good. For a start, the temperature on arrival in Mumbai was a cool 22 degrees and I was told it had rained for the past two days, though I’ve actually never seen rain in Mumbai before. Because of a new eight-lane highway, we got from the airport to the Taj Hotel in the city centre in just 40 minutes, despite a minor hold-up. As the car was idling in a traffic jam, a young boy who couldn’t have been more than six or seven tapped on my car window. He was holding a pile of books. I wound the window down, and he asked: ‘Would you like the latest Jeffrey Archer?

The week leading up to publication is a strange time for any author. You subject yourself to doing everything from BBC Radio Hebrides to reviewing the Sunday papers on TV, as long as they’ll give your latest book a plug. Mind you, most of them want to talk about anything except the new book. The Alan Titchmarsh Show wants to know whether I trained to be an auctioneer; the Daily Mail are more interested in how Mary (my wife) conquered cancer; The Telegraph are determined to learn more about a murderer I knew, who’s just got his MA, while the Times are keen to find out how often I attend debates in the House of Lords. It was ever thus. You may consider Castiglione: Lost Genius at the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace at 6 p.m.