‘I think I was born with a suitcase’

In literary critic Francis Spufford’s reading memoir, The Child that Books Built, he recalls how the geographies of his childhood shaped his interpretation of fictional settings:

For a long time, just as I set any wild scene in Keele woods, whenever I read a story set somewhere urban, I borrowed Newcastle in my mind’s eye as the 107setting. Newcastle figured as London, as Paris; tweaked with columns, it was Rome, with a few pointy bits on the roof it was Chinese. Later, when I read To Kill a Mockingbird, I made it into the Deep South.