'At a second-hand stall, [Richard Hillyer] bought a four volume Half Hours with Best Authors. One could dismiss it as a potted Anglocentric collection of snippets by dead writers, but as Hilyer explained: "The all important thing was that between the battered covers were bits and pieces from vast range of literature, people I had always wanted to read, and others I had never heard of, but standing in full tradition and waiting to be discovered. It is easy to talk of epochs in a life, events which are permanent, and far-reaching, enough to be called that are rare, but this was one. The dilapidated old book opened to me the sweep and grandeur of English literature better than most professional teachers would have done".'