Newcastle University

How do you think that your early experience of books has influenced your attitude to reading today?

I don’t think it’s influenced it at all! I think if you’re a reader you just go on, ever widening, talking to friends about it. That is part of it, sharing books with friends. I read an awful lot of detective fiction as well, cheap American detective fiction. That would be when I was thirteen, fourteen, when I shouldn’t have been. And I remember the English master saying, ‘Look, you’ve read enough of those, you’d better get back to Dickens!’ [laughs] I just used to read them in day – it’s awful, really, to think of, doing you no good whatsoever. […] So many, I just read one after the other just sheerly for the plot, to see who actually had done it.