IT comes like a bucket of cold water to discover that while the affairs of the heart are central to Louis de Bernières work, in real life he is at best dispassionate about love.

Avuncular and humorous, the author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin had the Queen’s Hall audience laughing with his throwaway lines. But, boy, you wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end of them.

‘In conversation with’ BBC Radio Newcastle’s Charlie Charlton, he was promoting the new book, Of Love and Desire , that heralds a return to his first love – poetry.

It is billed as a rich collection of love poems, written over a lifetime, and capturing its many forms.

He certainly captured the disillusionment of the break-up with his children’s mother, Charlie said, as she quoted from one of them, Lines Written in Bath : ‘Ten years you travelled from huntress to lover to millstone to liar to thief.’

She said: “It’s brutal! Are you not worried she might sue you?”

“Well, she isn’t going to read it, and if she does, she can’t deny any of it,” he replied jovially.

In another anecdote, he remembered the French girlfriend he’d met when she was a student in his philosophy class -–“We were allowed to get away with it then” – and her subsequent disappointment he didn’t want the whole marriage and children thing with her.

“As time went by, she’d begun to believe in me and more crazy things besides,” said Bernières. “She believed in anything.” Hence his poem For Sylvie: Who Believed in Reincarnation .

Sylvie has since died, but left a son behind who looks very like her.

“He came to stay with me and we spent a whole week just yakking in French – he’s coming to stay this summer too – so in a way, I’ve found a brand new friend just because I went out with his mother many years ago.

“He knew perfectly well his mother just got married because she wanted a child and that she hadn’t loved his father.

“I told him I thought I was the one who got away and he said ‘yes, you were’.”

Not surprisingly, references to optimism and pessimism peppered the duo’s conversation as Bernières, who now lives alone in Norfolk, admitted that he often looked back with bitterness in his work.

It was no coincidence that Thomas Hardy, similarly a pessimist who didn’t do happy endings, was his favourite novelist.

“I am a pessimist, but I still travel hopefully and I’m 61,” he said. “If you are a pessimist, you are delighted when things work out well, whereas if you are an optimist, you are often disappointed.”

He continued to entertain, while he informed, as he mulled over the revolution in poetry sparked by T.S. Eliot.

“A lot of people write by ‘prose cut up’ now, but I found my poetry very lumpy that way ... how do you put the rhythm into the prose? That’s what I’ve been working on for the past few years.”

And he reported that his 92-year-old father, while professing to be perplexed by his son’s poetry, felt that this, Bernières second collection, was at least an improvement on his first.

Odds on, the reading public can look forward to a third then. But just pity the people destined to be dissected by him.

Helen Compson