The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life. Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.

f they'd been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn't have known they were born if they'd not towed the line!

To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.