From Alice In Wonderland.to Jeeves and Wooster!

As he lends his support to the Daily Express Christmas campaign with Give A Book, master storyteller Jeffrey Archer reveals how reading shaped his life story

- Jane Warren

JEFFREY ARCHER has been an avid reader since, as a small boy, his mother introduced him to Swallows And Amazons. "It's a story with enduring appeal," says Lord Archer today. "I was very lucky with my mother; parents are very important. If they just say, 'Go and watch TV' it's very sad.

Give a book and you get a person started." That is why the author, who counts himself lucky to have grown up in a book-reading household, is backing the Daily Express Christmas campaign in partnership with charity Give A Book. The young Jeffrey progressed to Alice In Wonderland.

before his mother, Lola, a local newspaper columnist in their hometown of Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, decided to take Jeffrey's reading sessions in a new and unexpected direction to "After Alice, slightly unusually, we went straight on PG Wodehouse," recalls the author with a chuckle. And this, he insists, is not the only strange fact concerning himself and the creator of Jeeves and Wooster.

"The two most popular authors in India are myself and Wodehouse. Kane And Abel has been read by 100 million people in India, they just Ka Wodehouse," he says.

Ab He professes not to know what the connection might be between his bestselling title, which has sold more than 34 million copies worldwide, and the fictional creations of Sir Pelham Wodehouse. But when pressed, he suggests: "I think they equate me with being very British. In fact, I'm always surprised by how well my books sell abroad." Sharing books with his mother and grandmother, who was equally "big on reading", led to a lifelong passion and eventually to his enduring and prolific career.