The Sixties were an oyster decade: slippery, luxurious and reportedly aphrodisiac they slipped down the historical throat without touching the sides

If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.

I don't regard it as a historical novel, I regard it as a novel of now, which just happens to be set when it is set,

It just slipped out,

If he had been as you and you as he, You would have slipped like him

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.