WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, my father embarked with his family on his first sabbatical leave. I had many adventures in what were then strange, foreign lands, and was thrilled to arrive in Scotland, where I met most of my mother’s family for the first time. I loved Edinburgh, where we based ourselves. Its old buildings, majestic sites, exotic smells and accents, and my grandmother’s morbid fascination with graveyards and suchlike made it an interesting place to be. I was dimly aware that my father was shopping for antiques and old books and kept talking about some guy called Donald MacCormick, whom I vaguely remember meeting. At the time this book collecting seemed terribly dull and I did not share my father’s interest in it at all.
