During the last five years of my twenty years as a teacher of literature, largely working with adults in the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Liverpool, I began to want something else. I had no idea what that something else would be, but it would be something with literature, which had been for me both a life-saver and life-maker. I was increasingly conscious that this life-giving resource was not being utilised by many people who, like me, might have great need of it.

Such people might be people like my mother, who had died at the age of fifty-one from alcohol-related diseases. She was a keen reader-escapist, consuming acres of novels by Georgette Heyer, Dennis Wheatley and Dick Francis. These are books which, like drugs or alcohol, take you out of yourself and put your head somewhere else. I read them when I was a young teenager, because we had them in the house, but later, reading became something more than escapism. It's not been fashionable at any point in my life to think of books as moral teachers, but in the absence of parental guidance (Mum was usually in the pub and my father was not around) books offered clues on how to live a life. My relationship with literature deepened as, over a fifteen-year period, my mother drank herself to death, and I, propelled by unconscious necessity and fuelled alternately by hard work and lucky breaks, gathered a few qualifications and got myself to university to read English. In my third year I flourished under a brilliant teacher, Mr Brian Nellist. I went on to complete a PhD, became a university teacher and grew into someone with a life away from drugs and alcohol. I put quite a lot of that down to the input I had from great books.

In my years of university teaching, I read, as Dickens says in David Copperfield, ‘as if for life’. George Eliot, Wordsworth, Milton, Dante, George Herbert, Iris Murdoch, A. S. Byatt, Doris Lessing, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Gaskell, Saul Bellow, Dostoevsky and Bernard Malamud all helped me build an adult self.