Free Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! by Dr Maryanne Wolf & Dr Mirit Barzillai Jeanette Winterson Zadie Smith Michael Rosen Tim Parks Blake Morrison Mark Haddon Jane Davis Nicholas Carr Carmen Callil

unknowingly piece together a jigsaw of the writer’s secret life?
    And then it dawned on me. You can’t help reading a string of questions that are addressed to you without answering them, which is precisely what I found myself doing. Some of the questions had no answers and some had obvious answers with no resonance. But some made me dredge up memories that had been buried for a long time, and a few made me probe parts of my mind where I’d never probed before. And I began to realise that this strangest of books was the best example of something as common as rain, something shared by every good book I have ever read. This wasn’t a monologue. This was a conversation. The secret biography was my own. It was a book about me. And if you read it, then it will be a book about you.
    In an interview after the novel was published Powell was asked who the narrator of the book was. He answered, memorably, ‘Dude, c’est moi.’ He was wrong, I think. The correct answer was, ‘Dude, c’est toi.’

Michael Rosen

Memories and Expectations

    WE ARE ON holiday on the coast of Yorkshire not far from Whitby. It’s a campsite and there are two families with a couple of friends added in. This is 1959 and I’m thirteen. Just as it’s getting dark we are called to the biggest tent where my father is pumping up the tilley lamp, a large green light that works by burning paraffin under pressure in a ‘mantle’ – a white cylinder of cloth that sits at the top of a tube. He loves faffing about doing this, and that’s what he calls it when he pretends it’s bothersome. ‘It’s a bit of a faff,’ he says whilst adoring the way that it’s his expertise with the paraffin can, the funnel and the little brass handle that delivers this hard, white light.
    So we sit ourselves down on sleeping bags, blankets and cushions. The tilley lamp sits on a fold-up wooden chair, my father sits on another in the middle of us. Looking round the tent, I can only see our faces catching the light, as if we are just masks hanging there, our bodies left outside in the dark perhaps. In my father’s hands is a book –
Great Expectations
– and every night, there in the tent, he reads it to us. Without any hesitation, backtracking or explanation he reads Pip’s story in the voice of the secondary-school teacher he is, but each and every character is given a flavour – some more than others: Magwitch, of course, allows him to do his native cockney. Thinking about it now, I can see that his Jaggers was probably based on a suburban head teacher from one of the schools he taught in; Uncle Pumblechook could have been derived from the strangely pompous shopkeepers and publicans who peopled the hardware stores and cafés of outer London, where we lived in the 1950s. But over the years, as my father tells us about his own upbringing, some of Dickens’ characters start to mix and merge with our own relatives.
    There is someone called Uncle Lesley Sunshine who, like Pumblechook, turned up in my father’s home when he was a boy to offer advice and hold out prospects of betterment. This was London’s East End, a terraced house in one of the streets behind the London Hospital in Whitechapel, where my father and his sister were being brought up by their mother, Rose, along with her mother and father, and it’s where several (how many? more than we could ever count) of her sisters and brothers live, too. Lesley Sunshine seems to have dropped into this crowded world from some other well-heeled sphere in order to take the ‘boy’ to places where he will be improved, like a tailor’s, who, because he is a relative, will fit the boy out in a decent bar-mitzvah suit for free.
    Rose has plans of her own for the boy. Somehow, in ways that my father never found out, she summons people from another world into their home. On occasions seamen from Russia, Jamaica and America would find their way to their kitchen. At the time my father didn’t know how or why they got