‘Perhaps it is only in childhood,’ Graham Greene writes in his essay ‘The Lost Child’, that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already … But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune-teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water
