The Moment You Lose Curiosity In The

No Emergency Was Ever Dealt With Effectively By Democratic Process.

I Was The Basest Of Readers. All I Wanted Was My Own World, And Myself In It, Given Back To Me In Artful Shapes And Accessible Form.

Cecilia Wondered, As She Sometimes Did When She Met A Man For The First Time, If This Was The One She Was Going To Marry, And Whether It Was This Particular Moment She Would Remember For The Rest Of Her Life - With Gratitude, Or Profound And Particular Regret.

Four Or Five Years - Nothing At All. But No One Over Thirty Could Understand This Peculiarly Weighted And Condensed Time, From Late Teens To Early Twenties, A Stretch Of Life That Needed A Name, From School Leaver To Salaried Professional, With A University And Affairs And Death And Choices In Between. I Had Forgotten How Recent My Childhood Was, How Long And Inescapable It Once Seemed. How Grown Up And How Unchanged I Was.

I Like To Think That Each Book I Start Is A Completely New Departure But I’ve Learned That Whatever You Do, Readers Will Have No Difficulty Assimilating It Into What You’ve Done Before.