I used to think that practically all Leavis's pupils must (like me) have come from grammar schools, but there was in fact quite a strong contingent from those largely non-boarding but fee-paying establishments that lay between the State sector at one extreme and Eton or Harrow at the other (Dulwich College, with its large number of pupils on local or county scolarships, would be one example). I was born in an unlovely suburb called Swinton and Pendlebury, which lies about four miles out of Salford on the road from Manchester towards the coast. My grammar school was in Whitefield, at a similar distance from Manchester, but to the north rather than the west. Close by was the suburb of Prestwich, where many of the region's more prosperous Jews lived so that Stand Grammar School (as we were called) was saved from the cultural uniformity of its rival establishments by a large number of Jewish boys. The novelist Howard Jacobson was one of these but since he is three years younger than I am, and three years during schooldays might just as well be ten, I did not get to know him well until we found ourselves at Downing together. I ought by rights to have left before he arrived, but at the time I was offered my place it was assumed that I would only take it up after I had spent two years in the Army, Navy or Air Force, completing my ‘national service’.

National service was abolished just as I was about to undertake it, so that I was then left with a couple of years in which I had to occupy myself as best I could. Whether Leavis spontaneously wrote to me with a list of books I ought to read during this waiting period or I had the courage to approach him for advice, I can't remember. The main contents of the letter he sent me I can't remember either, which suggests they were of a kind which would become familiar to me later and which represented Leavis's powerfully distinctive view of what mattered most in the history of English literature.