“ We couldn’t have used a knife. We couldn’t have tolerated the sensation of its going into human flesh. And we had too vivid an apprehension of consequences – emotional as well as retributive – to perpetrate such an outrage – for we knew it to be an outrage – on the body of another person. Reading does this – it sensitises you to other people’s pain, it sensitises you to yourself, it awakens the faculties of sympathetic imagination. There are readers who commit violent acts, but there would be fewer violent criminals – and I don’t invite discussion on this subject – if there were more readers.