Books, and the worlds they present, when they are passed from hand to hand, can be coded but open messages: ‘Here, read this and see who I am and what it is that I see in you; what I want to say but can’t say so well or so openly.’

One afternoon on 1951, in the old Queensland State Library in William St, as I sat sweating over a Latin prose, Johnny Milliner, who had been in my Sixth Form class at Grammar and whom I had first met when we were eight or nine years old down the beach at Scarborough, sat down opposite and pushed a book across the desk. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘you should read this’.