¡°Do you want to be the canon¡¯s mouthpiece?¡± I asked a friend whose university had invited him on to a committee to identify 150 books that all undergraduates ought to read. But then I recalled that once, in my youth as a schoolteacher, I had established a literary canon of my own. One of my responsibilities had been the library, where, beyond the broad staircase in the vestibule, a blank wall faced the visitor. I appropriated the space and smothered it in books by former pupils, so that newcomers, as they crossed the threshold, saw a great heritage spread before them and might reach for equal eloquence and influence. I was realistic enough to know that the books would remain unread, but I thought that at least, if students passed close to the shelves, something might, as it were, rub off.

It is hard to identify texts that constitute genuinely universal culture: even the Bible, Marx, Homer, Darwin and Confucius penetrate patchily. Like the school where I tried to be a teacher, every community has its canon, but most people are too idle to read their own scriptures, or too dim to grasp them: they commonly hear digests from catechists and commissars, who must then endure the frustration of getting confused fragments back, washed up in students¡¯ work like the flotsam of some terrible wreckage. ¡°Required reading¡± provokes examination howlers: Macbeth¡¯s witches represent satin; Cleopatra stuck an aspidistra in her breast. A fellow undergraduate of mine recalled that man is a political animal, everywhere in chains, and that covenants are but words, but could not say how Aristotle¡¯s, Rousseau¡¯s and Hobbes¡¯ doctrines differed, or who said what.

Founders and forgers of canons have, moreover, a tendency to expand them to the dimensions of an evermore yawning bore. If l¡¯app¨¦tit vient en mangeant, menus are bound to lengthen. A publisher recently asked me, for?public relations purposes, to name my five most influential books: every title that came to mind sparked 50 others, at least as dear and important to me. There seems to be a current vogue for ¡°1,001 books you must read¡±. Far more people will read the forthcoming list by historian William Roger Louis for its author¡¯s fame, his pithy summaries and his shrewd animadversions, than will ever read all the books. Even at a title a week ¨C surely an unrealistic tally, especially when most of the tomes are hefty and intellectually demanding ¨C 1,001 amounts to a sentence of 20 years¡¯ incarceration between bindings.

The books that ought to be in everyone¡¯s canon are, as far as I can see, never included. I mean those that, in a given community, everyone reads and understands; those that everyone knows best and can recall vividly; those whose influence lasts a lifetime; those whose characters we love most and keep in our hearts forever; those that communicate lessons that go deepest and endure longest; in short, those that exceed all others in the effect that they have on us. Obviously, the books that meet these criteria are those we read in childhood.

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Children¡¯s books are often among the best in the world because they are unpretentious, and pretension is the curse of consciously literary efforts. They are often relatively short, and concision is a way of concentrating power. Pictures frequently accompany them, and fix in our minds images that we can never escape. We read children¡¯s books with relish unfiltered by inhibitions, and enthusiasm unsubverted by cynicism. So we embrace their influence, with none of the wariness that makes our mature judgements ¡°balanced¡± and therefore constrained. I like ? la recherch¨¦ du temps perdu ¨C or at least the first couple of volumes, before the sex gets too strong for me ¨C but I¡¯d rather have the works of E. Nesbit on my desert island. Give me Dahl before Dostoevsky. I learned politics from The Wind in the Willows, morals in Narnia. I escaped from the suburbs into Hundred Acre Wood and Kipling¡¯s jungle. Pages Glorieuses de l?Arm¨¦e Fran?aise made me a five-year-old historian ¨C not because I shared its gaudy, joyous patriotism, but because it alerted me to the partiality of my English pre-prep teachers¡¯ version of the past.

Because adults write them, good children¡¯s stories disclose new depths if you re-read them at intervals. My fellow collegian, Bryan Ward-Perkins, and I were once the only members of the Oxford University Tintin Appreciation Society. Even in senectitude, I rate Kidnapped and Mr Midshipman Easy among my favourite books. I have read few better works than A High Wind in Jamaica. Oscar Wilde wrote brilliantly for all ages, but never better than for children.

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If we want a canon to give us a common culture, let us make it of children¡¯s books. At least there¡¯d be a chance that people might read them, whereas it is pointless, with most readers in mind, to urge the Bible or Plato¡¯s Republic or the speeches of Demosthenes or the Buddhist classics or The Bhagavad Gita or Roger Louis¡¯ indispensables or Leavis¡¯ Great Tradition. I don¡¯t claim such a canon would be easy to define. I asked my class for help. A few students had read The Lord of the Rings. All could summarise a Harry Potter saga. None had read Treasure Island.

Felipe Fern¨¢ndez-Armesto is William P. Reynolds professor of history at the?University of Notre Dame.???