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I'm torn between James Hogg, Confessions of a Justified Sinner and anything by Mervyn Peake.

Not one single piece, but one kind of teaching: putting a really good (preferably difficult) poem in front of a small group of students who've not seen it before and working through it with them. I've not had time in my schedule for ages to do this kind of close reading 'for it's own sake' with my college undergraduates, but I managed to carve some out this term and it was much the most exhilarating teaching I did in the term. We looked at a pretty wide range in 8 weeks: Roy Fisher, Denise Riley, Frank O'Hara, T. S. Eliot, Byron, Keith Douglas - pieces they were unlikely otherwise to have had time for in the syllabus. They loved it; I loved it. It's a great exercise in on-the-spot critical judgement, and honing your critical descriptive skills - and it can be made to connect closely with work they are doing in a more historical contextualised way for other courses. (Several of them went on to write about O'Hara, for example.) But if you are asking me which single text I most like teaching: it's a really hard call. Daniel Deronda, perhaps? Culture and Anarchy? but then I feel a strong tug back to the more contemporary poets even as I write this ...

I dither. I rowed for my Cambridge college's graduate crew for a bit, and coxed briefly - but drew a line under that part of my sporting career after an incompetent undergraduate cox steered a boat (I was subbing at no. 2) into a barge at the side of the river. The entire force of the boat at race speed went into my stomach (on the blade handle). I came to under the water, not knowing which way was up. Growing up in NZ, I'd seen endless repeats of the 'how to avoid drowning' ad: blow bubbles; they will rise to the surface; follow them up ... Problem was, the water was so filthy I couldn't see the bubbles. I eventually worked my way out from under the boat and swam to safety. Then was violent ill all night. Now I stick to running. And no, I've never been tempted by University Challenge.

There's a pretty standard list: strong academic record, good references, interesting and sufficiently focused project - which is doable in the time available (the timing varies significantly from country to country - in the UK it is 3 years). It needs to be ambitious enough to justify 3+ years full time work, have a visible research dimension, and be coherent in its own terms (why these writers on this topic? ... ). And it needs to be well written. Not least, it needs to genuinely interest you.

Good question. It couldn't take place in a city, could it, without radical reimagining? The way it asks you to think about human natures as 'given' - able to be distorted, yes, but not fundamentally changed in terms of how strong or weak particular individuals are - only really makes sense in a context where human beings live close to nature, and close to animals, and are unsentimental about what nature does and doesn't allow to flourish. The weather makes a difference too, in that the novel's strong sense of naturalism makes it seem often as though human behaviour is subject to strong and sudden impulses - storms, lulls - as if it's elemental not culturally determined (though of course it is in part shaped by cultural circumstance - she's not indifferent to that). One of the reasons I hold back in the Introduction from completely endorsing Edward Chitham's account of how the novel may have come to be written at the length it is (and in 'two halves') is that he argues that Bronte was writing in tune with the seasons. (It is winter in the novel because she was writing that section in winter ...) I'm not as happy to limit her imaginatively as that strong view of the shaping circumstances of writing would have it.