I read Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners for the first time in February 2012. I was 24 and in the first year of my degree at the University of Kent, taking a course entitled ‘Readings in the Twentieth Century’.

I’ve been dipping into Woolf’s essays again recently, as I work on an article about Night and Day. And re-read her commemorative essay on Henry David Thoreau, which was published as the lead article in The TLS in July 1917. I read it for the first time when I was working on my PhD and exploring Djuna Barnes’s difficult relationship with the American Transcendentalists. My sense then was that Woolf was highly suspicious of Thoreau’s anti-social tendencies. Some of my discussion of Woolf’s essay ended up in my book.