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'The house in which I was born was ... a two-centuries-old Georgian mansion, a barrack of a place that seemed even larger in my juvenile perspective than it actually was ... Here—when I grew older and had learned to read—I could get away in a corner and read all day until a properly organized search party routed me out. Castle Squander, Handy Andy, The Absentee, and many another old Irish tale of the "big house" found a not inappropriate setting for me in those echoing rooms with their cracked plaster ceilings and tattered wallpapers.'