Literary guide to England - Telegraph Part of the appeal of that line probably had to do with the fact that it summed up something about our lives. We were rich kids, the children of academics, who went to the local state schools. But we were also another kind of transplant. Our house was filled with European things: blue-and-white China, picked up at Bermondsey market, McVities digestive biscuits, Bombay mix, Dresdner stollen, because my mother is German and my father, a New York Jew, had fallen in love with London during grad school. This is what complicates my relation to England - the fact that I lived there, too. Not only every summer, when my parents escaped the heat and stopped in London on our way to Germany and my mother's childhood home. But for several sabbatical years, when I was two and four and seven and 13. My earliest memory is eating from a glass pot of yogurt and looking out from a second-floor window onto a rainy London street. Every part of that memory could only have happened in Europe - the glass pot, the second-floor dining room, the busy, rainy road just below us. How much of what I learnt about England from all those books matched up with my first-hand experience? That's hard to say. The idea of culture, of what it means to be cultured, which Morse and Rumpole and Cooke were selling, had already dated by the time I got there. Theirs was a world in which Palgrave's Golden Treasury mattered, and gentlemen could quote A Shropshire Lad to each other, and barristers might express a clear preference for the Q edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse. But it wasn't quite dead. There's a bookstore in Hampstead (it's still there) where I bought Victorian editions of Shelley and Keats for a couple of quid. I could walk from our flat (I was just starting my GCSEs at the time), through 18th and 19th-century streets, and buy writers who might have walked those streets themselves. The people I encountered, though, had more to do with what I had seen on television, and the books I had read out of school. I noticed the blurring of class distinctions, which Fry and Laurie traded on; the friendly, casually angry and Left-wing flavour of student life; and something typically English about a certain kind of hopeless attempt to keep up with the times, which John Mortimer and Alan Bennett gently caricatured, in Rumpole and Titmuss, and the Talking Heads series, which were broadcast on Sunday nights in Texas on KLRU. I taught Bennett's Bed Among the Lentils recently, to a class of English undergraduates. They loved it, but what struck me is how old-fashioned it already seemed - the vicar's wife, the Indian shopkeeper. I don't think a writer writing now would be able to justify so much of her seduction by way of those exotic lentils. It's not just that the food culture here has changed, but the sense of the exotic has changed, too. When I was seven, my father got a job at Wolfson College, and we moved to Oxford - it might have been a permanent shift, except that at the end of two years my parents decided to return to Texas. Those two years turned out to be very important to me. Summertown is a great place to be a kid. We could walk to the river through college, buy ice creams at the boathouse or gobstoppers on the high street. There was a communal garden behind our flat, where the kids played cricket and football. Later, when I heard the song Penny Lane, I thought of those wide quiet suburban north Oxford streets. Nostalgia kicks in early, at least it did for me. At 13 or 14, I was already looking back to those years in Summertown - as soon as my brother left for university. This is also the age at which I started reading seriously on my own, as the childish family life I knew began to break up and change around me. And I can't think of a better description of what that's like than David Copperfield, even if our Peggotty at the time, a blonde-haired au pair named Wilma, came from Schleswig-Holstein. Benjamin Markovits has written a trilogy of novels about Lord Byron.