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'Like many other privileged people, I learned to read before I was five, and have hardly stopped reading since. That was the way things were in that long-ago pre-TV world, when we children read fiction mainly per courtesy of writers like Enid Blyton and Mary Grant Bruce, who had not then come under a cloud of anachronistic criticism.' (Introduction)
'Vaccine comparisons. Mass protests. Interstate sniping. Quarantine complaints. Community scapegoating. The pandemic soundtrack closes around us like an ever-tightening girdle; each new statistic and flash of opinion and political obfuscation turns the screw further. The daily press conferences have become morbid viewing, sound clips looping on endless repeat, channels of doom. As the miasma invades my psyche I realise it’s not the lockdown or even the pandemic causing the greatest distress; it’s the dissent emanating like scattershot from the calamity’s core. Everywhere I look, it seems, there is something ready to flay my already-scorched nerves.'(Introduction)