Juliet Townsend

Turning back the pages

Magic Moments: The Books the Boy Loved and Much Else Besides, by John Sutherland<br /> Curiosities of Literature: A Book-lover’s Anthology of Literary Erudition, by John Sutherland<br /> <br type="_moz" />

Magic Moments: The Books the Boy Loved and Much Else Besides, by John Sutherland
Curiosities of Literature: A Book-lover’s Anthology of Literary Erudition, by John Sutherland


John Sutherland’s life has been devoted to the enjoyment of books and the passing on of that enjoyment to others, whether through his columns in the Guardian and Financial Times or through his teaching to the literature students at UCL, or the rather less bookish science buffs at the California Institute of Technology. It is hard to imagine anyone better suited to bringing the pleasures of reading to those for whom it has never been an important part of life. His quirky, amused and tolerant eye roams freely over the whole field of books, finding something to attract and entertain in the most unexpected places.

His two new publications illustrate this from different angles. In Magic Moments he looks back to his early years and some of the key events with books, music and film which seized his imagination for better or worse, and changed the way he saw the world. The childhood section is particularly evocative for anyone brought up in a household of boys in the Forties and Fifties. Tarzan reigned supreme, although for the five-year-old John Sutherland he was not the Lord Greystoke of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books but the hero of Tarzan’s Desert Mystery, Johnny Weissmuller, with arms and legs of simian hairiness and a torso suspiciously smooth as a baby’s bottom. Other heroes of the author’s early days included the Amazing Wilson, the barefoot athlete whose deeds of derring do appeared weekly in the Wizard — ranging from effortlessly running a three-minute mile and smashing the long jump and high jump world records, to beating Hillary and Tenzing to the summit of Everest.

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