That’s the role I play as cinematographer in understanding the script and the director’s intentions, and translating it into images that express the ideas.His last film was Peter Yates’s Curtain Call (1999), a flat romantic fantasy which failed to get a cinema release despite the efforts of such stars as Maggie Smith, Michael Caine and Marcia Gay Harden. On his previous film, Enskilda samtal (Private Conversations, 1998), directed by Liv Ullmann, friends and co-workers noticed that he was slurring words, tiring easily and becoming frustrated at an inability to express himself. There must have been many people who, while championing some novel over a glass of warm wine, have felt their own passion for it dwindling as it is talked to death.From the titles that are selected to the clash of egos which marks literary discussion on these occasions, book clubs tend to be dominated by a hard-eyed snobbery and competitiveness that somehow discourages reading, replacing it with pretentious literary talk. When a book is laid on a slab and eviscerated, its inner workings probed and mulled over by earnest amateurs, the life soon ebbs from it. Book club devotees like to believe that their activity is about communicating enthusiasm about a favourite book to others, but analysis and discussion rarely have the same effect as a simple, straightforward recommendation.

There has been a television sitcom about these meeting groups, and the American writer Jane Hamilton, in her novel Disobedience, joked that they exist largely to give women the chance to complain about men. But now Virginia Ironside has put the case directly in her celebration of life over 60, No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club. “The idea of sitting about with a group of other ladies of uncertain ages, droning on about contemporary novelists, fills me with horror,” she says.Quite right, too. The snobbery that is an essential part of the literary world infects the wider world through its product. Articles and websites offering advice on “how to build a library” are less concerned with the reader’s inner life than creating for them the right parade of books to impress visitors.Until recently, few have dared to suggest that the hallowed contemporary institution, the book club, is part of the same general pattern.

It is helpful if the volume in question is hard-covered, the assumption being that no pervert or maniac would ever read a hardback, and that the worst risk a woman runs is that the reader might turn out to be a bore.
It is no great revelation that a book is not always about reading; it can be a small but effective advertisement for the person who is carrying it. A handy accessory on these occasions is a book, preferably by an author who is neither too obscure nor too popular – Paul Auster, say, or Mary Gaitskell, Geoff Dyer or Richard Dawkins. Another is to sit alone in quiet contemplation in front of a picture at an art gallery. One is to wander the aisles of supermarket with the almost-empty trolley of a sad singleton (a chicken pie, a packet of frozen peas, some roll-your-own tobacco), occasionally asking where the extra virgin olive oil is to be found.

Men in the habit of behaving badly – irresponsible or adventurous, depending on your point of view – claim there are certain useful ways of attracting female attention. Yet, as far as I’m aware, no political party has a housing policy that might make a difference.joan.bakewell virgin

More from Joan Bakewell. In the 1950s when he was Minister for Housing Harold Macmillan got 300,000 new houses built a year. It was a staggering achievement and probably helped him win subsequent elections.