After a short visit to Germany and time spent working for a London publisher, he entered St. John's College, Cambridge. He has described his years there as "agreeable but unexciting," the dons elusive, and the undergraduates "on the whole less interesting than the people I used to meet at home." Beginning as a student of history, he switched briefly to moral sciences (philosophy), despaired at the dominant linguistic approach, and returned to the study of history. He had already decided to become a writer, but both his father and the English tutor, Hugh Sykes Davies, warned him against the pernicious effect of reading English literature in an academic setting. Because of that warning he is now an accomplished stylist and, by his own standard, "wretchedly ill-read."
Read's history studies included readings in American history and the history of political thought, both of which would provide material for his analysis of capitalist culture in The Professor's Daughter (1971). Because of his father's long interest in politics and his own recent exposure to French public affairs, he joined a number of under-graduate political clubs.
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