It’s so wonderful when actors behave exactly the way you imagine one of their characters would, inadvertently encouraging you to go on deluding yourself that the character actually exists in real life. So a big thank-you this morning to Dan Stevens, who plays the upstanding, serious dreamboat Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey, for agreeing to be a judge for next year’s Man Booker Prize, something it is very easy to imagine Matthew Crawley wanting to do. Matthew totally wants to read lots of novels and then talk seriously about them! (Even if the people he wants to talk to will be a bunch of aristocrats amused by his bourgeois interest in the novel, and put off by the confident and slightly condescending way he patiently explains to them that they are wrong.) Obviously, the odds just got a lot better for all books written by anyone named “Mary.”
