• What were you reading when you were a child, and when you were a teenager?
Mr Hager: To be honest, not as much as I should have, and certainly nothing literary. It was more adventure stories or spy thrillers. I don’t remember reading ‘proper’ literature, really, until I was maybe sixteen. My A-level teachers would talk about great books they’d read and that inspired me to try them out. I remember buying The Brothers Karamazov because of a philosophy of religion lesson, and taking forever to read it, but it started me off reading quite a lot of other Russian literature from the 19th century which I really loved. I realised that books were much more interesting than pretty much anything else. I read quite a bit of Victorian literature after that, as well as more modern American stuff; Paul Auster was, I think, the first writer whose work I tried to read in its entirety when I was still at school.
Mr Hager: To be honest, not as much as I should have, and certainly nothing literary. It was more adventure stories or spy thrillers. I don’t remember reading ‘proper’ literature, really, until I was maybe sixteen. My A-level teachers would talk about great books they’d read and that inspired me to try them out. I remember buying The Brothers Karamazov because of a philosophy of religion lesson, and taking forever to read it, but it started me off reading quite a lot of other Russian literature from the 19th century which I really loved. I realised that books were much more interesting than pretty much anything else. I read quite a bit of Victorian literature after that, as well as more modern American stuff; Paul Auster was, I think, the first writer whose work I tried to read in its entirety when I was still at school.
Miss Ramsay-Overall: I was really big into Harry Potter (I actually still have my crisp first edition Philosopher’s Stone from 1997… I refused to bend the spine, even at 8)
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| A signed first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, sold at auction in 2017 for £85,000 |
