Although, like most, I acquired full literacy at school, I didn’t actually start reading until I was twenty-one. I’ve written in We Are What We Read in some detail about how and why this happened. But the author that cued me up for these experiences was undoubtedly E. M. Forster. He’s often misconstrued as polite and genteel, but he was the mouse that roared. A Room with a View is a novel that masquerades as a simple heterosexual love story, but it is really a young gay man’s coming-out fantasy. I saw the film of the novel as a teenager in the 1980s, when I was all but lost to the world, and it pulled me back from the brink.

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