Liz Suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Meat and drink for the imagination

Judith Flanders

Saturday, 13th April 2002

I sat on the second stair in our house in a Montreal suburb. The dog passed me from time to time and stopped to sniff, but no one else did, neither stopping nor sniffing. I don't know why I chose that place, I never had before, and I never did afterwards. Whatever the reason, on that step I read Little Women, the first 'grown-up' book that ever came my way: a book with no pictures. And for the time it took, I was in turn Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy. I didn't understand their father's absence in the Civil War - I don't think I even understood it was a war. I certainly didn't understand the references to Pilgrim's Progress. But what I did understand was that this was a new place, one where I fitted in.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page

More articles from: Judith Flanders | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Subscribe Now 12 issues for £12 in the UK : Gift subscriptions : Overseas subscriptions

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Immortalised in print

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2001-2004, edited by Lawrence Goldman

Real Life

Melissa Kite

Writer’s block

The Turf

Robin Oakley

Be patient

To become an extremist, hang around with people you agree with

Cass Sunstein

Cass Sunstein — co-author of the hugely influential Nudge and an adviser to President Obama — unveils his new theory of ‘group polarisation’, and explains why, when like-minded people spend time with each other, their views become not only more confident but more extreme

Who would have thought a herd could moonwalk?

Mark Earls

The acclaimed web theorist, Mark Earls, says that the death of Michael Jackson unleashed the extremes of collective action: mass mourning and sick jokes