The voices themselves are fascinating in their diversity. No fan of J.R.R. Tolkien in myth-making mode, I was unprepared for his sheerly likeable, undogmatic tone and his way of dealing with a somewhat hectoring interviewer, but J.B. Priestley was as full of experience and unpretentious wisdom as I’d hoped. There’s a mandarin languor to Somerset Maugham’s utterances, a sense of Evelyn Waugh’s working hard at being polite; and Nancy Mitford, of whom one might expect decidedly ‘U’-type articulation, sounded warm and friendly; while Baroness Orczy comes across as preposterously and hilariously posh (‘happened’ becomes ‘heppened’). You may be surprised as I was at the lightly amused sound of Rudyard Kipling – or the firm Scots plain-speaking of Conan Doyle.

The mention of Doyle recalls me to the more serious matter of what these interviews reveal of the authors’ approaches to their work. Any true Holmesian would doubtless know that the inspiration for the scientific approach to crime of the great sleuth was Doyle’s mentor at medical school in Edinburgh, who could assess his patients’ backgrounds just by looking at them. This led Doyle to want to replace chance as the crime-solving mode in popular fiction with more logical methods based on comparable observation. This is at odds with Orczy’s romantic account of how the Scarlet Pimpernel invaded her imagination as she stood on a dreary underground station on a foggy day in London, and became ‘the favourite child of my brain’.

Kipling, addressing the Canadian Authors’ Association in London, believes that ‘We who use words ... cannot tell a lie ... If we do, we betray ourselves’; and Virginia Woolf is simply wonderful on words. For her, ‘the power of suggestion’ is the ‘exciting property of words’. ‘Words,’ she says, ‘are full of echoes ... they’ve been out and about.’ Who, she wonders, can ever hear the word ‘incarnadine’ without hearing an echo of Macbeth? Hers is a democratic approach; she doesn’t want us to rely on professors and reviewers, but on words, and she values uneducated usages because she hates words to be stamped with one ‘correct’ meaning.

For E.M. Forster, the author’s function is to speak the truth – to impose discipline on oneself – and he doesn’t disdain the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’, seeing art as ‘a self-contained harmony’ and believing that ‘Art is valuable because it has to do with order’. Aldous Huxley, interrogated by John Lehmann, sees novel writing as a ‘way of learning, of clarifying one’s own mind’, rather than as having any didactic function, and considers Mescaline as just the thing for ‘professors’ and others with fixed habits of mind. Self-critically, Graham Greene claims always to have been aware of ‘that thing that went wrong’ in his novels, citing The Power and the Glory as his ‘best by a long head’, while for Harold Pinter it is a matter of setting two people in a room: nothing new about that, he says, except your own individual way of handling the situation.

They are idiosyncratically varied in their attitudes to critics and readers. Mitford, living in France, is funny about the abusive letter she received advising her that: ‘If you don’t like the trains here [on a visit to England], go back to the Paris brothels where you belong.’ Rebecca West deprecates the over-fastidious, extended little-finger approach to critics; Coward is predict-ably simplistic and dismissive of John Osborne and the Angry Young Men; and Angus Wilson insists that irony doesn’t preclude sympathy in his renderings of contemporary life, whatever critics say.

But I have only scratched the surface of the rich pickings here. Get hold of these CDs and listen at your leisure to what some of the most famous twentieth-century authors were up to – or thought they were.