I am a ravenous beast when it comes to reading. I’ll read anything and everything, it’s as if I fear that in one second every book in the world will disappear and only memory will keep them alive.

There weren’t many books for me to devour when I was growing up, and although my mother is now a voracious reader, she wasn’t when we kids were young. There was a battered copy of Exodus by Leon Uris in the shed which I read without comprehension, but the brief passages I did get; the battles, the love story, were thrilling. (When I later backpacked through the Middle East and read it again, I saw with new eyes, just how brilliantly Exodus worked as a propaganda tool.)