Newcastle University

In terms of the benefits of reading what would you say that reading books gives you?

Sometimes they give you insights into aspects of human behaviour which you haven’t thought much about. I’ll tell you one that – I can’t remember the name of it, but it was a book about homosexuals who’d been in the army in the First World War and their experience when they came out of the army living as civilians in the years after the First World War […]. And that, I felt, that enhanced my understanding of what it was like to be a homosexual, and didn’t reduce homosexuality to an ordinary kind of behaviour, but made it possible to think that homosexual love had the same worth and value as heterosexual love. And I felt that was good for me to understand that, because I think, perhaps unconsciously, I still retained prejudices, and that helped me to overcome those particular prejudices.