In fact the trouble I was having with ethics was that I’d never thought about them before–in any sense. I had opinions on almost every subject, could argue any position and believed in almost nothing. I grew up, not necessarily with the belief, but with the feeling powerfully impressed on me, that life was a question of surviving, of making it through, not getting caught. I wasn’t interested in politics. When people told me that England was, and always had been, in the throes of a class war to the death, I listened with a smile. I wasn’t waiting for a revolution. I was waiting for romantic love. My ideas of art and beauty came from Blake, Byron and Emily Brontë, not to mention the gorgeous third movement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, a recording of which I’d stolen from the public library. I was waiting for happiness, and at Cambridge I was happier than I’d ever been.

I had in fact stolen my first book when I was fourteen–a paperback edition of Dracula; the second was Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobopalapbamboom, the Paladin edition, a lovely thing with a Guy Peellart illustration of Elvis on the jacket. But now I couldn’t be stopped. I stole a first edition of Scoop–Waugh had done the jacket art himself–priced at seventy-five pounds by the Heffers second-hand and antiquarian department. I stole the sturdy and solemn-looking Yale edition of the works of Samuel Johnson, one volume at a time. I walked away with Heinemann firsts of Enderby Outside, Tremor of Intent and A Clockwork Orange. The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman, Cape, 1939, buckram-bound. A cased, Cassell edition of The Father Brown Stories. Harold Nicolson’s biography of George V; A. J .P. Taylor’s English History 1914–1945; Ian McEwen’s First Love, Last Rites; Crash by J. G. Ballard–those angular, oddly austere Cape jackets by Mon Mohan. I stole books every day. I went on expeditions first thing in the morning and again late in the afternoon, wearing a baggy jacket and marching out with books tucked in the armpit. The elegant John Murray edition of Byron’s correspondence–I stole two at a time, Byron being slimmer than Johnson. I stole the war memoirs of David Lloyd George, brick-heavy, but I thought I’d better give them a whirl. The Neville Spearman first of A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren was daftly underpriced at twenty-five pence on one of the stalls in the Market Square. I stole it anyway. I made the acquaintance of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth in the shape of various firsts stolen from all over town. I stole first editions of John Stuart Mill’s autobiography, Bleak House by Dickens and Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Black Mischief, an old Chapman & Hall first, no dust-jacket, but handsome with mottled brown boards. A 1788 three-volume reprint of Johnson’s Rambler essays, leather-bound, black, with gilt lettering. I loved those things. I stole Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus. The First Raymond Chandler Omnibus (Hamish Hamilton). Finnegans Wake. The Penguin P. G. Wodehouse novels, a rare excursion into paperback because I liked the artwork. Nabokov’s Ada, Lolita and The Gift, as well as the four hardback volumes of his annotated translation of Eugene Onegin, boldly boosted in a Routledge boxed set from Bowes & Bowes.

In the Cambridge market square, there was an old brass fountain, tarnished with age and gummed up with drinking straws and cigarette butts and always smelling of urine. Drunks lolled on its steps, cradling tins of Carlsberg Special Brew or bottles of Anglia Sherry. The story was that one of them was a former don, an eccentric figure with his paunch and wild, grey hair and one of those plaid American hunting caps with the flaps at the sides. He was always shaking, as if shivering away some attack, or perhaps it was the DTs. Reputedly he’d been a brilliant philosophy lecturer, the protégé of Wittgenstein himself. Now, for the price of a pint, the master’s one-time heir would recite the first five pages of Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus.

I believed the story while finding it at the same time utterly unfeasible. I didn’t see how anyone could snap so absolutely: at least I wouldn’t. The world was there to be conquered, if you were any good. Failure could be handled, indeed must be handled; as Noël Coward had said, success was merely the infinite capacity for dealing with it. I was against moral slipping or any seepage of morale. I didn’t believe in leaky boats.

I owed the college £652.75.