One Man down

A few years ago Susan Hill, one of my fellow Man Booker Prize judges this year, wrote a charming book called Howards End Is on the Landing, in which she wandered round the bookshelves in her house, musing on her literary loves and the influence of books on her own life and writing. Her shelves were obviously packed and I've been wondering how she has managed to accommodate the Man Booker books. No fewer than 138 novels were submitted for the prize, and they turned up at our houses in regular deliveries between December and July. Some of them arrived twice, bound proofs followed by the finished versions.

Even when we acquired Kindles, the hardbacks still came, too. The flood of books got ever faster, like the brooms in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. I started by piling mine up on the sitting-room floor. Then, as the pile grew bigger, it spread to the stairs. Little heaps of books lined themselves up on each tread against the wall, like a rickety ladder. Not a good idea. One particularly large book got itself out of place and tripped up a guest who cannoned down the stairs and ended up with 14 stitches - a casualty of the Man Booker.

Good baddies

What do you read after spending ten months reading 138 modern novels? Poetry? Essays? History? Surely not more novels? As I completed my third reading of our six shortlisted books last weekend, my hand moved along the shelf and it stopped at John Buchan.

No one can match Buchan for villains. The seedy, unshaven anarchists and strangely spoken Russians that pass for villains in Spooks can't hold a candle to men such as the German Graf von Schwabing, from The Thirty-Nine Steps. This is a man who can hood his eyes like a hawk and successfully impersonate the British First Sea Lord at a top-secret meeting with people who are close colleagues of the real one; or Colonel von Stumm, with his great lazy smiling face: a perfect mountain of a fellow with the reach of a gorilla. To say nothing of Hilda von Einem, the evil, pale-blue-eyed northern goddess whom all men fear. And Harry Pearce and his team, with their banks of computers and their dodgy moral codes, are pygmies compared to Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot. You can't imagine those men cutting loose an agent whom they've promised to protect, or, worse, having an affair with her and then denying the son that was the result. That is not the stuff that built the empire.

1984 surveillance

Writing this reminds me of my last encounter with the New Statesman. It took place in 1984. One evening just after supper there was a knock at the door of our house in Islington. One of my daughters opened the door without checking through the spyhole as she had been told to do. A man on the doorstep asked for me.

“Mum," she yelled, leaving the door wide open. As soon as I appeared, there was a flash from the front garden. Just for a split second
I feared it was a gunshot but almost at the same time I realised it was a camera. I slammed the door shut and the journalist and I shouted at each other through the letter box for a few minutes, as he asked for an interview and I told him to go away. At the time, the writers at the New Statesman were doing a series of "exposés" of MI5 officers whom they wrongly thought were engaged in improper investigations of political figures. By sheer chance they had managed to find our address from a school friend of my younger daughter. That was the evening when my daughters first began to suspect there was something strange about the job I did.

The snatched photograph can't have been a success, as a few days later they came back and snapped me covertly as I walked to the Tube. The resulting, rather blurred picture of me wearing a black-and-white houndstooth coat and carrying my lunch sandwiches in a small Jaeger carrier bag appeared in the magazine. When, at Christmas 1991, my appointment as director general of MI5 was announced, it was the only publicly available photograph and it had many outings in newspapers all over the world. The Jaeger carrier bag started years of obsessive interest in the media in where I bought my clothes.

Spy kids

Though I am not a consultant on Spooks (pace Mr Leo Robson), I am a trustee of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. This week a notice arrived for a trustees' meeting. The success of this museum, the only one of its kind in the world, shows the enduring fasci­nation with spies and spying. Is it because of greater openness about intelligence services and what they can and can't do, or in spite of it? Or is it all to do with books and films?

Whatever the explanation, this is one of the most successful museums in a museum-rich town. Any weekend or school holiday, it swarms with children decrypting secret messages and testing their cover stories. This summer we partnered with the Chautauqua Institution in New York State in a programme of lectures and events to commemorate 9/11. My 12-year-old granddaughter spent a part of her summer holidays at spy camp on the beautiful Chautauqua estate, happily learning the arcane skills of surveillance, brush contacts and disguise from a former KGB general and a brace of retired experts from the CIA.

Squirrelled away

The Prime Minister wants us to pay off our debts and the deputy governor of the Bank of England recently told us to spend our savings. The message has not got through to the squirrels in my garden, who are saving like mad. Fallen apples, walnuts, unripe figs are all being carried off over the fence to some cache in my neighbour's garden in an admirably earnest and concentrated effort that I fear may mean that they know something about the forthcoming winter that we have not been told.

Stella Rimington is the former head of MI5 and chair of the 2011 Man Booker Prize judges. The winner will be announced on 18 October