It didn't help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of leading to . If anything, my education gave me the opposite impression, of an end to cultural history round about the time that Forster wrote . The quickest way to kill all love for the classics, I can see now, is to tell young people that nothing else maters, because then all they can do is look at them in a museum of literature, through glass cases. Don't touch! And don't think for a moment that they want to live in the same world as you! And so a lot of adult life -- if your hunger and curiosity haven't been squelched by your education -- is learning to join up the dots that you didn't even know were there.