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Diary

A.N. Wilson's diary: The book that made me a writer – and the pushchair that made me an old git

Plus: The joys of Finland, and the genius of Betjeman

23 August 2014

9:00 AM

23 August 2014

9:00 AM

Like many inward-looking children, I always doodled stories and poems. Knowing one wanted to be a writer is a different matter altogether. That moment came when I read Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria. I was sitting in the Temple Reading Room at Rugby. The final paragraph, in which Strachey imagined the dying Victoria at Osborne House, sinking out of consciousness as the scenes of her past life flitted through her brain, struck me as one of the best pieces of writing I had ever encountered.

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