'I spent hours, days, in the great Reading Room of the Mitchell Library. Young as I was, in my ragged shorts, frayed jersey and ill-fitting jacket, incongruous among the sleek, well-nourished university students, I became so familiar to the staff that they dubbed me, in kindly fashion, "the young professor". One day, perhaps as a piece of sympathetic magic, I looked up Einstein's massive entry in "Who's Who" and copied it out word for word, his universities, degrees, honorary doctorates, publications. I kept that transcript pasted into an exercise book, a talisman'.