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“... like us.’ My personal mythology has me reading this letter at the age of nine, when they sent me Oliver Twist and Great Expectations as a birthday present. But it must, in fact, have been written when I stood as Labour candidate in the mock-election at my girls’ grammar school, in 1964. Far from being embarrassed by my mother’s politics, I was rather ...”

“... sitting down occasionally by the wayside to dip into it.’ My great-grandfather soon discovered Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas De Quincey. ‘The beauty of the prose poems and neatness of the humour was such as I had never before met with.’ The practical mysteries of propagation and grafting now cohabited with another less focused compulsion, the urge to ...”

“... brutally, casually cruel: his men are all ‘gimps’ and ‘geeks’, substance-addicted sad-sacks, perverts and crooks, anorak-cases with ‘cheese-culture skin’ and scalps ‘ornamented with scabs’. And his women – of which there are, unsurprisingly, mainly three – are ludicrously gorgeous, pouting projections of male fantasy, with vaguely ...”