Aug
25
Category: 
|I shall not name the pompous fool of an English teacher at Westcliff High School for Boys who worked so hard to persuade me that reading really was a terribly dull pastime by extolling the wonders of the Julie Christie / Terence Stamp version of Far from the Madding Crowd and 1970s BBC Shakespeare over, for example, John Wyndham, Sue Townsend and Alan Paton.
However, one of the authors who turned me back on to reading is Julian Barnes. He is an intelligent writer of witty, original novels, short stories and letters. I’ve just bought (for one whole penny on Amazon) his Letters from London which he wrote for the New Yorker magazine between 1989 and 1994. I have been astonished to learn that Michael Heseltine was, in 1990, worth £65 million.
