“When I wrote that [Elias] Canetti ‘desired’ a book, I was perhaps understating. He conveyed the sense that select books were inexorably his – magically so. Some years later, he came into the room in which I worked and saw on my table two books I had found on a bookstall the day before. One was a collection of Indian folktales called, I think, Tales My Amah Told Me; the other was a literal translation of – a crib to – the writings of the Emperor Julian. His wanting them exuded from him as a blatant and viscous desire that seemed almost tangible, as enveloping and threatening as any tentacles of ectoplasm emanating from a Victorian medium. Those books were no longer mine. I handed them over.”