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Brecht and Goethe were passions for the one-time Labour press supremo who loved learning languages.
I was born in Keighley, West Yorkshire, but when I was 11 my father, a vet, went to work for the Ministry of Agriculture and we moved to Leicester. I was enrolled at City of Leicester Boys' School, a comprehensive, in the middle of term.
In my fourth and fifth years and in the sixth form I had John Webster as my German teacher. I studied English, French and German at A-level. My father came from the Inner Hebrides and English was his second language after Gaelic, and one of my two brothers is a linguist, so an interest in languages runs in the family.
Mr Webster was a very encouraging teacher - he obviously loved the language and loved it when people really engaged with it. Once he accompanied us on a school trip to Krefeld in Germany and the teachers we met there said Mr Webster was the only non-German they had ever heard who spoke the language flawlessly. That impressed me.
Because...