‘I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books–whether it’s strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives.’ Cecilia Aherne

‘There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.’ Doris Lessing

Bookshops have always seemed to me to possess a deep magic—alluring, mysterious, intimidating. As a child I always had a frisson of fear when stepping over the threshold of a bookshop: it was like being transported to another world. All the best bookshops have the characteristics of a TARDIS—they appear to be bigger on the inside than the outside; they can transport you anywhere in space and time, to the distant past or the distant future, any place in the universe, and they are operated by madmen. I should know.