This brought to mind how, sitting in the small library near our terraced house in the North east, as a 9 year old, I was leafing through books about the history of England and it was all illustrations and texts glorifying - if not deifying a parade of Kings and Queens. Reading Charles Dickens' novels a couple of years later was like a medicine counteracting the false narratives of those books.

Of course I didn't have the vocabulary to articulate why I liked Dickens' novels especially, 'Great Expectations', and Oliver Twist', so much, but they certainly gave more insight into the 'collective' past - though it would be many more years before I realised that that sense of the collective was decidedly skewed in the direction of Eurocentricity.