Sebastian Faulks has, inadvertently, done all his fellow novelists a favour. His announcement at the Cheltenham Literature Festival that he has taken a self-denying ordinance when it comes to offering physical descriptions of female characters in his novels, having been criticised for doing so in his 2018 novel Paris Echo, has pointed up the absurdity of some of the prohibitions currently facing writers in terms of what they can and can’t write about. ‘Novelists’, as Muriel Spark used to say, ‘are liars’. We make things up. We imagine and create people who live only in our books and, we hope, our readers’ minds. We have a licence to invent.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy is written in the third person, but everything is seen from Cromwell’s point of view. Her Cromwell is completely credible. In these novels we have a woman of today creating a man and his world, the horrible court of Henry VIII, more than five hundred years in the past. In one sense it is a marvellous piece of cultural appropriation. The same could be said of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. She was a woman of the 20th century daring to speak in the voice of a Latin- and Greek-speaking Roman emperor eighteen hundred years dead. It is a wonderfully daring impersonation and a great novel. Mary Renault went even further, casting her Alexander novels through the eyes of a beautiful castrated Persian boy.

Men have always written about women and women about men. I recently reread a delightful novel, Museum Pieces, by William Plomer. The narrator is a middle-aged woman. Plomer was a middle-aged man. So what? The only interesting question is: ‘Was it well done?’

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I am delighted to be appearing on 2 November at the Borders Book Festival, relocated, for this year at least, to Sir Walter Scott’s house, Abbotsford. I’ll be talking with the festival’s founder and director, Alistair Moffat, about my book The Ragged Lion, an imagined version of Scott’s autobiography, originally published a quarter of a century ago and recently reissued by Birlinn. It never sold well, doubtless in part because admirers of Scott, more numerous than many may suppose, sensibly thought there was no point reading my book when they could read the Waverley novels and Scott’s own journal (on which it shamelessly draws). No great matter: I enjoyed writing it as much as any of my thirty or so books. This year is the 250th anniversary of Scott’s birth and it’s sad that Covid-19 has restricted celebrations.

I don’t know who first called Scott ‘The Great Unread’. He no longer is. All his novels are in print. But he is a writer for grown-ups and it is a mistake to foist his books on the young as school texts. I found The Antiquary tedious when it was set as an A-level text. Now I delight in its comedy. Of course there are boring passages in Scott. No reader should be ashamed to resort to what Scott himself called ‘the laudable practice of skipping’. He was middle-aged when Waverley, his first novel, was published. The young lovers in the book are a mere convention and generally dull; I don’t think their words sounded in his head. Other dialogue is full of life and humour, though his use of the Scots vernacular may force the reader to turn to the glossary. The Bride of Lammermoor gives the lie to what E M Forster said about Scott lacking passion. Indeed, the novel inspired six or seven Italian operas before Donizetti hit the jackpot with his Lucia di Lammermoor. For many The Heart of Midlothian is Scott’s masterpiece, but my own favourite is his last great novel, Redgauntlet, which begins as a thoroughly enjoyable, relaxed comedy and leads to a nice piece of counterfactual history, ending on a pleasingly melancholy note. I must have read it a dozen times.

Scott made his name first as a poet, and there are beautiful lyrics scattered through the novels. Even the long narrative poems retain some vitality. A dramatised version of The Lay of the Last Minstrel was a success at the same Borders Book Festival a few years ago. Scott’s admirers are legion. When Thomas Hardy first read The Iliad, he declared it was almost ‘in the Marmion class’. Virginia Woolf thought that the only question when you had finished one of his novels was which other one you should read again next. Georges Simenon, astonished by the grandeur of the Scott Monument in Edinburgh, said, ‘you mean they put that up to one of us? To a novelist? But, after all, why not? He invented us all.’ Even Cabinet ministers read Scott, but this shouldn’t be held against him.

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Sally Rooney would, it seems, be happy to have her new novel translated into Hebrew so long as it is not published by an Israeli firm ‘that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people’. This puts her in a rather Boris Johnson-like position: pro cake and pro eating it. Her position would be more consistent if she wasn’t apparently content to have her work published by a state-approved firm in the People’s Republic of China. And what does her high-minded refusal say to Jewish novelists published by the company she refuses to allow to publish her novel? Some of them are at least as critical of the policies of Israeli governments as Rooney is and are more knowledgeable about the tragic trap in which Israelis and Palestinians are caught. I think of my late friend Amos Oz, one of the most humane, liberal and talented novelists, an Israeli patriot and a critic of Likud.

Amos opposed the settlements and the occupation of the Palestinian territories from the start, though he had fought in the Six Day War. He believed up to his death in the two-state solution, even when others had abandoned the idea. He took the long view of history. How long, he asked in a Guardian interview some years ago, did it take the nations of Europe to prefer peace to war? He was a founder of the Peace Now campaign; he still believed peace would come to the afflicted land some day. Anyone who hasn’t done so should read not only his novels but also his remarkable piece of reportage In the Land of Israel. It is almost forty years old, but still very relevant.