India, May 17 -- 1Can you tell us a bit about your fascination with Shakespeare. In Will in the World, you call him a "person who wrote the most important body of imaginative literature of the last thousand years." My love for Shakespeare started fairly late. As a graduate student I wrote on Raleigh, not on Shakespeare. And yet Shakespeare is like an enormous planet Jupiter, and it slowly pulls everything that's floating around closer and closer to the centre. 2In your book Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, you comment on contemporary politics, including on Donald Trump. How can reading Shakespeare help us understand Trump's return? Often, Shakespeare asks himself, "How can a country fall into the hands of a catastrophic leader?" And he thinks the principal answer is election, not assassination. This is the whole point of Richard the Third, who only becomes what he is because enough people support him. Donald Trump is not Superman who miraculously has so many powers. He has to have many people who feel they have a stake in what is being done, and want it done. The question is, why should you think about literature in this context? The reason is that great literature, Shakespeare's plays being an example, tends to show the complicated, mixed motives that lead to catastrophes of this kind. 3At a session at the Jaipur Literature Festival, you mentioned feeding Shakespeare's reading list to a Large Language Model. What is your stand on AI? Shakespeare at the end of his life was reading Cervantes's Don Quixote, and he wrote a play based on an episode in it called Cardenio. It's lost (an adaptation of the play called Double Falsehood was found later). So, I wrote a version (performed in Kolkata in 2007) based on Double Falsehood and I thought it would be fun, just as an experiment, to see what happened if you fed the play into AI and said, "Write Cardenio". It will almost certainly fail to give us something truly powerful because AI is not human. It doesn't have the craziness that human beings have. But also, there are guardrails built into AI so it can't be misogynistic, or homophobic. It's difficult to write a Shakespeare play without crossing all kinds of lines. I asked the same AI model to do a version of Taming The Shrew that wasn't misogynistic, and it erased virtually the entire play. 4You speak of loving a work of literature, but cancel culture has overpowered this narrative. Walter Benjamin, the great German critic, said, "Every monument of civilisation is a monument of barbarism". If you look hard at Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, you realise it's complicit in horrendous colonial acts in Ireland, but you must love the poetry simultaneously. Understand that if you simply hate it, you're missing nine-tenths of what matters. I love the works, but I also want to understand what they're complicit in....