Michael Bracewell

Novelist, essayist and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell is the author of six novels and three works of non-fiction, including 'England Is Mine' (1997) and 'Perfect Tense' (2000). He writes extensively on contemporary art, and is a regular contributor to frieze magazine. His most recent book 'The Space Between: Collected Writings on Art' - (2012) is published by Ridinghouse.

1 What is your favourite surface?

That of the walls of a recently re-plastered and repainted room: a smooth coolness. Or freshly fallen snow.

2 In what weather do you think best and why?

Overcast, mild and blustery; also dazzlingly sunny winter stillness, late morning to mid-afternoon.

3 Describe your favourite meal?

When done well, fish and chips. Or kedgeree.

4 What qualities do you most admire in an object?

Aesthetic first, and then a degree of inscrutability that seems to make an object more defined as itself, rather than as an acquiescent player within a broader collective. I very much admire antiquities that now exist as fragments, and in their time worn state – the sheen of age, spear or shrapnel wounds in the marble. The sheer force of Roman statuary is so compelling to the viewer. I am particularly turned on by the notion of using low forms as the agents of high ideas.

5 What is your first olfactory memory?

I suspect it is the memory of damp autumn leaves – a suburban memory.

6 What fictitious place would you most like to visit?

Narnia.

7 What do you like the smell of.

Coffee, nail polish, wood smoke, freesias, coriander, the edge of a ploughed field after a rain shower, patchouli…

8 Recount your last remembered dream?

Too fragmentary to narrate: more an accretion of extremely vivid moods, the combined effect of which was threatening and disorienting.

9 How should a table sound?

Quietly solid.

10 What piece of art would you most like to live with?

This changes daily. At the moment (20.38 UK time 01.10.13) Ferdinand von Wright: In the Garden of Haminalahti, c. 1856-57.

11 Which sense disturbs you most frequently?

Sight.

12 Which sense would you miss the most?