'After I left school, the Mitchell became if possible even more important. I read widely, indiscriminately: the lives of the great philosophers and scientists, history and ideas, particularly of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, logic. It was a halting progress, for at every step I had to make up for lack of background, of facts, of definitions, of words, and buried my nose in dictionaries and the "Encyclopaedia Britannica", which led of course to more and more sideways reading.'