When I arrived in Florida in the late 1960s, I shifted from the close reading and judging that Cambridge had tried to instil in me and that, despite being largely impervious at the time, I had carried on when I took my first teaching job in Ghana in the early 1960s. In the US, while excited to encounter the wonderful writing of Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and James Baldwin, I met clever scholars reading in the old-fashioned way, bringing into their study whatever knowledge they’d acquired of works, writers and their times. And, outside the classroom, I read Kate Millett.

I settled into what I liked best, the biographical, critical and literary combined, hearing people talking about authors as once living beings, letting the idiosyncrasies of their existence speak if they wished – without the moral and political patina of Leavis or Williams – and as time went by, without being completely overwhelmed by the angry interpreting of Kate Millett. But then, after a few more intellectual and geographical detours, I made another move, to New Jersey. Into the thick of it.