Impossible to pick just one. The authors I return to again and again are:
Dickens: For lots of English people, especially from working-class backgrounds, Dickens is a kind of folk hero. In fact, reading him is like visiting my ancestors (who were pretty much all English-British). Nobody ever created so many vivid, three-dimensional characters, each with their own peculiar mannerisms, their own way of speaking and moving. Every sentence is packed with life and energy and joy. And he is fearless. There is nothing he won’t confront, nowhere he won’t go. Dickens is a world.
Jane Austen: Like Dickens, she too is a world, though narrower and less vivid. A wonderful writer - funny, ironic, humane, and romantic. She’s a superb stylist, and, like Dickens, a wonderful observer. I re-read her constantly and find something new each time. No wonder Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky admired her.
P. G. Wodehouse: People dismiss Wodehouse as a light, middle-brow writer. But they’re wrong. He wasn’t a comic novelist. He was an artist. When Wodehouse died, some critics compared him to Shakespeare and Keats, and they were right to do so. He doesn’t write prose, he writes beautiful, sparkling poetry. At his best, in books like Right Ho Jeeves, he outshines almost every author in the English language. Compared to him, even great writers seem dull and plodding and clumsy.
Patrick Leigh Fermor: Fermor was a travel writer and war hero, who wrote several books about his adventures. As a travel guide, he’s often hopeless (critics complained that he got everything wrong), but that’s not why you read him. You read Fermor for the pleasure of his company. Everybody who met him said he was a dazzling conversationalist, and it comes through in his writing. This was a man who read Proust in French and Homer in Greek, who’d fought behind enemy lines in WW2 and tramped across Europe as a teenager. He is interested in everyone, and always sees the best in them. After reading him, I feel better about people and about life. He cheers me up, and reminds of the things that make life worth living - friendship, books, food, language, travel, conversation and beauty.
Those would be the four authors I’d take to a desert island. If I couldn’t have them, my backups would be Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Oscar Wilde, Harold Bloom, Rudyard Kipling, Anthony Burgess, and Evelyn Waugh.
I know somebody will complain that my choices are all English. I know they are. I’m English! It’s perfectly natural to gravitate to writers from your own culture. Everybody else does. It’s only the English who are made to feel guilty about it.
If I was forced to chose just one, it would be between Dickens and Wodehouse...but if you put a gun to my head I’d choose Wodehouse.