“I would love to be able to say that, as a precocious child, I fell in love with the works of Marcel Proust. In fact, the book I remember reading again and again was Bears in the Night by Stan and Jan Berenstain. It has 32 pages of illustrations and about the same number of words, mainly prepositions such as “through”, “between”, “up”, “over” and “down”. The gripping plot involves bears who hear a spooky sound, get out of bed to find out what it is and then go home again, none the wiser. Still, I was only five.”