The author would like to thank the many people who wittingly and otherwise gave me information, encouragement or ideas, among them Lynn Barber, A.S. Byatt (sadly missed), Jenny Colgan, Matthew Dennison, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Roy Foster, Georgia Garrett, Tanya Gold, Michael Moorcock, Marcus Nevitt, Ruth Scurr, Piers Torday and Frances Wilson.
Thanks to my agent Toby Mundy, without whom this book wouldn’t have happened; and the best of editors, Cecilia Stein, without whom it wouldn’t have been any good. And I’m honoured to have Paula Clarke Bain as my indexer. And a huge thanks to the publishing teams at Oneworld in the UK and Sutherland House in the US and Canada.
A flexible day job has also been a huge help: thanks to Fraser Nelson and the incomparable Clare Asquith. Thanks, too, to the raiding team of Always Lost, who kept me cheery during the hermit-like writing phase. I could not have written this book at all without the love and support of my wife, Alice, who put up with all that time I spent reading children’s books, and my own children Marlene, Max and Jonah, whose tastes have helped to shape mine.