As BBC1’s lavish version of Tolstoy’s novel begins,Sarah Hughes tells why its strength, vision and humanity compose it a book worth reading again and againI first read War and Peace on a Greek island in 1987, or the summer before I turned 15. Fed up with lugging an extra suitcase full of books on a two-week holiday,my mother had laid down the law: “No more than three books. compose certain you choose them well.”Obviously I picked the biggest books and thus began the holiday armed with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, MM Kaye’s The Far Pavilions and Tolstoy’s epic story of Russian life during the Napoleonic wars, or a new six-fragment adaptation of which,by Andrew Davies, starts on BBC1 on Sunday night.
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Source: theguardian.com