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My earliest reading memory
Sitting on the sofa with my mum reading Mabel the Whale by Patricia King, with beautiful colour illustrations by Katherine Evans. I think it was pre-school. My mother was not always a patient teacher, and I was often a slow learner, but the scene, the tableaux, in memory, has the serenity of an icon.
My favourite book growing up
Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth. It’s a story set in Roman Britain; the Eagle is the lost standard of the ninth legion. I was a boy already obsessed by all things Ancient Roman (the alternative to the kind of boy obsessed with dinosaurs). One of the places I remember reading it is in bed with my dad. On Sunday mornings my brother and I would climb into the big bed. My parents had long since split up. There was a picture on the wall, a modest reproduction of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. To me, this voluptuous woman gazing at herself in a mirror was my mother. It’s interesting to me how the setting in which you read is such an integral part of the reading experience.