If you are lucky, you were read to as a child. Some books will have sunk without trace in your memory, though a parent may tell you resentfully that you insisted on the same one every evening, and they can still remember all the words. Sometimes forgotten impressions surface years later: my non-sporty husband’s identification with the hero of The King who Couldn’t Kick’ or my own love of sleeper trains, which I trace back to T. S. Eliot’s Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat. […]