Because I simply could not have existed, as I am, in any other preceding time or place…. I could have been a professional writer at any period since the seventeenth century in Britain or in France. But I could not have combined this latter with a life as a sexually active woman until the introduction of contraception…. A ‘new kind of being’, unburdened with a past. The voluntarily sterile yet sexually active being, existing in more than a few numbers, is a being without precedent.

As you can tell from the colourful scraps of oriental brocade and Turkish homespun I have sewn into this bedcover, I then (call me Ishmael) wandered about for a while and sowed (or sewed) a wild oat or two into this useful domestic article, this product of thrift and imagination, with which I hope to cover myself in my old age. (QM 139)

the term ‘fairy tale’ is a figure of speech and we use it loosely, to describe the great mass of infinitely various narrative that was, once upon a time and still is, sometimes, passed on and disseminated through the world by word of mouth – stories without known originators that can be remade again and again by every person who tells them…. fairy tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world. (FT, p.ix)