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My earliest reading memory
Beatrix Potter when I was having my tonsils out. No point saying how much I loved her books because everyone does, but Roberto Calasso makes a brilliant point in The Celestial Hunter by pairing “two great moments in the Victorian age” when Darwin “linked human beings to primates” and Potter “distributed human behaviour among a certain number of small domestic and rural animals”.
My favourite book growing up
The Guns of Navarone. My first Alistair MacLean, the first of about 20 before I grew out of him at the age of 15. They were thrilling and addictive and it was possible, while reading, to visualise every scene so clearly (helped in part by the scene-enacting photos on the covers of the Fontana editions).
The book that changed me as a teenager
I was being changed on a weekly basis by what I was reading from O-levels onwards. I could single out Jane Austen’s Emma as the starting point, but more important than any particular book or writer was the acquired habit of reading, the solace of interiority.
The writer who changed my mind
The big revelations and re-evaluations, respectively, took place in my 20s with Marx and Nietzsche. Freud, by contrast, seemed daft and cultish.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I never particularly wanted to be one; being a writer was one of many possibilities simmering away and this is the one that happened to come to the boil. Very different from Walt Whitman, who said he was simmering, simmering, and Emerson brought him to the boil.
The book I came back to
I’ve reread The Names by Don DeLillo more than any other book. It remains a high point, not just in DeLillo’s career but in the history of the postwar novel.
The book I could never read again
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. I tried a couple of years ago, not because I’d loved it first time around, in my early 20s, but because I hadn’t really liked it then. Second time around it seemed complete tripe. I’m often struck by the consistency of my feelings about books.
The book I discovered later in life
Everything by Elizabeth Taylor. If I had to choose one it would be A Game of Hide and Seek but her 12 novels and the hefty volume of short stories lit up my mid-60s. Also, the first 12 novels by Anita Brookner, a subtle and quietly pathological writer. When someone writes essentially the same book over and over you’re in receipt of an enacted philosophical consciousness. Having said that, Brookner’s persistent and gradually shrinking sameness led me to pause at about the halfway mark: 12 down, a dozen to go.
The book I am currently reading
Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets. One of those perennially bubbling-under modern classics – too good for the Championship, unable to sustain a place in the Premier league – which turns out to be way better than some of the canonical stalwarts permanently installed in the top flight.
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My comfort read
Tessa Hadley’s Clever Girl – except it’s not comforting at all because although it seems to contain an easy-to-understand guide to writing fiction it turns out to be impossible to extract the necessary skills from the pages in which they are so abundantly and discreetly revealed. So the open secret remains as mysteriously elusive as ever. Which is fine because I don’t go to books for comfort; I have a much-loved memory foam pillow for that.
