'[Neville] Cardus read only boys' papers until quite suddenly, in adolescence, he dove into Dickens and Mark Twain. "Then, without scarcely a bridge-passage, I was deep in the authors who to this day I regard the best discovered in a lifetime" - Fielding, Browning, Hardy, Tolstoy, even Henry James. He found them all before he was twenty, with critical guidance from no one: "We must make our own soundings and chartings in the arts... so that we may all one day climb to our own peak, silent in Darien".'