All History, Of Course, Is The History

But Who Knows Their Own Child? You Know Bits - Certain Predictable Reactions, A Handful Of Familiar Qualities. The Rest Is Impenetrable. And Quite Right Too. You Give Birth To Them. You Do Not Design Them.

Forever, Reading Has Been Central, The Necessary Fix, The Support System. Her Life Has Been Informed By Reading. She Has Read Not Just For Distraction, Sustenance, To Pass The Time, But She Has Read In A State Of Primal Innocence, Reading For Enlightenment, For Instruction, Even. ... She Is As Much A Product Of What She Has Read As Of The Way In Which She Has Lived; She Is Like Millions Of Others Built By Books, For Whom Books Are An Essential Foodstuff, Who Could Starve Without.

Giving Presents Is One Of The Most Possessive Things We Do, Did You Realize That? It's The Way We Keep A Hold On Other People. Plant Ourselves In Their Lives.

The Present Hardly Exists, After All-it Becomes The Past Even As It Happens. A Tricky Medium, Time - And Central To The Concerns Of Fiction.

The Idea That Memory Is Linear Is Nonsense. What We Have In Our Heads Is A Collection Of Frames. As To Time Itself-can It Be Linear When All These Snatches Of Other Presents Exist At Once In Your Mind? A Very Elusive And Tricky Concept, Time.