Reading fiction is an intimate business. For ten, fifteen, twenty hours of glorious solitude, you engage with ideas, events, and, most especially, characters located in periods and places not your own. The connection with fictional characters can sometimes feel more real and enduring than relationships with real people. For a few years in my youth, I was so deeply attached to the young Hurtle Duffield in Patrick White’s The Vivisector that I wrote a short story in which Hurtle and I lived with Patrick White and Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury.