About the age of eight, I was seized by the idea that I had to read the classics. I didn’t know what the classics were, or whether they were three books or 300, and so dragged my poor mother to a second-hand bookshop in the middle of Manchester, and there was a row of Dickens novels. I said to the man, ‘Is that the classics?’ And he said, ‘Well, yes, part of the classics.’ So my mother put down five shillings and paid the rest off in instalments of two-and-six. I read my way doggedly and uncomprehendingly through quite a few of them.

Now scholars are not generally masters of prose, and the combination of the critical and the constructive gift — of science and art — is almost unknown to-day, when learned translations and exact commentaries are common enough, but the majority of ancient books have still not been turned into English classics. The English Bible is an exception. We do not think of it as a translation at all: we think of it as the greatest of English classics, which, among other things, it is.