We Are What We Read

But there was little that was normal about mine and our family’s relationship with Dad. I certainly didn’t love him, whatever that meant.

Intelligence is no use unless it’s buttressed by other faculties like tenacity. I get my tenacity from my mum

He created chaos wherever he went. He went to prison at least twice and nearly ruined our lives.

He would want his distinguishing feature to be his intelligence and aptitude, but it was his temper. The second most distinguishing: jealousy. Together, they are like mixing a binary explosive

When I catch myself in these kinds of behaviours, on a depressed spending spree or working some complex scheme, I dwell on this inheritance

I’m now the age he was when he became debilitatingly ill, and I’m still no closer to understanding the mess of conflicts that he was

one of the kids read it, paused and said, ‘What a bastard!’ It was kind of okay in the context of the class because they suddenly realised that the speaker of the poem was manipulating everyone.

It’s in moments like those that readers are made. Emotions matter.

I was asked to read Romeo and Juliet long before Baz Luhrmann filmed it. I found it incomprehensible.

Teachers are left to cope as best they can

Forcing kids to learn unnecessary grammar and times tables – it’s like when teachers in the 1980s used to say, ‘You won’t have a calculator with you everywhere you go.’ We showed them, didn’t we! With a phone and a smartwatch, my answer would be, ‘No, Miss, I’ll have two, and that’s not counting my laptop, two iPads and fifteen smart speakers.’