In 1978, approaching my late 20s, I was in a state of confusion: anxious to find a new direction as a historian, keen to get stuck into something big and try to make it my own, but wholly unclear about what it should be.

Yet in the event, Howards End was about to change my life for a second time. It had been a solemn moment when in 1973, just after leaving university, one of my best friends had handed me a copy of Louis Althusser’s For Marx and not long afterwards, writing what became my first book, an explicitly socialist study of the Victorian working class that had no truck with reformist verities or achievements, the shadow over my shoulder belonged not to Forster but to EP Thompson, with Eric Hobsbawm lurking just behind. At Oxford, I would still have considered myself a fully signed-up Schlegel, but by the mid-1970s, beginning to make my way in London as a historian, liberalism was no longer enough. Then came the 1970s and the outside world. Over the next few years I became friends with boys far more creative and imaginative than me made the usual progression from the Beatles to Dylan via Donovan listened religiously each Sunday afternoon to John Peel’s Top Gear co-founded the Wellington College Progressive Music Society (I know, I know) and developed a deep, atavistic loathing for the philistine rugby culture that dominated the school. Perhaps the rest would have followed anyway, but now I had my founding text. Looking around at my fellow pupils, at my teachers, at my family, it all made compelling sense – whereas EM Forster’s supreme, transcending message of “only connect” had little impact by comparison. On the other hand there were life’s Wilcoxes: people of prose not poetry, deeply pragmatic, living by a code of “telegrams and anger”. On the one hand there were life’s Schlegels: cultured, searching for truth, believing in the supremacy of personal relationships. That explanation – or the part that got through to me – was essentially binary. Reading it had all the force and shock of revelation, making sense of the world just at the moment I was most susceptible to having the big picture explained to me. O ne may as well begin with the 15-year-old reader: at a single-sex, military-flavoured boarding school parents divorced (father an army officer, mother a book-reading German) fascinated by politics priggish barely spoken to a girl glorying in his most recent birthday coinciding with England winning the World Cup glorying too in never again having to set foot in a science lab given Howards End to read by a nice, shy English teacher.

Howards End by E.M. Forster