Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

During the fifties, Erich Fromm published a book called The Forgotten Language, in which he said that the only universal language which breaks across barriers of race, culture, time, is the language of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, parable, and that is why the same stories have been around in one form or another for hundreds of years.

Someone said, "It's all been done before."

Yes, I agreed, but we all have to say it in our own voice.