We are the willing prisoners of the chances of our lives – upbringings, friendships, lucky (and unlucky) breaks. It happened that I was born into an outsider’s love of Russian culture. The first serious novel my mother pressed on me was War and Peace.
Half a century later, reread more times than I can remember, it remains my guide to the tricky business of being a human – an engrossing, irresistible handbook of goodness and wickedness; the interplay between intimate life and public life; and above all, the dazing flicker between intense joy and spasms of grief that we call being alive. I would cast away every book of religion and philosophy for Tolstoy.
