Maurice Saatchi talks about his  late wife Josephine Hart

There is one thing that cannot happen online, which does happen in a bookshop – I think you call it serendipity – which is a human being doesn’t necessarily know what it wants so it’s not as easy as just saying, “well I’m only interested in roses so I’m going to the rose section and then I’m going to buy a book on climbing roses” because the human mind wanders all over the place and serendipity happens in a bookshop in a way that it can’t happen anywhere else.

I’ll give you an example, the other day I was in a very nice bookshop and for no reason at all – because I’m not interested in this subject – I was looking at the military history section and I happened to see a book on Napoleon’s Greatest Victories, next to it there was something about Nelson’s naval strategy and in between the two, I had no interest in either of them, in between the two unbelievably was a book on the history of the music hall – an illustrated history of the music hall – and because John Major is a dear man and he had just published a book on the history of the music hall because his father was in the music hall, I bought him this book and he didn’t have it and he was thrilled with it, I was thrilled to give it to him and there you are.

That’s serendipity, which can only happen in a bookshop because people don’t know what they necessarily want it’s just going to happen; that’s one of the things about being a human being, isn’t it