The March of the Novel through History: The Testimony of my Grandfather's Bookcase Text of the Arthur Ravenscroft Memorial Lecture, delivered at the University of Leeds, 5 March 1997

As a child I spent my holidays in my grandfather's house in Calcutta and it was there that 1 began to read. My grandfather's house was a chaotic and noisy place, populated by a large number of uncles, aunts, cousins and dependants, some of them bizarre, some merely eccentric, but almost all excitable in the extreme. Yet I learnt much more about reading in this house than I ever did at school.