The government’s boys into books scheme got a boost this week, albeit overshadowed by straw-clutching headlines about closing failing schools, and it raised a bit of a smile at the thought that a librarian had been asked to compile a list of books boys between the ages of 11 and 14 would like. In almost a decade teaching at the City of London Boys school, I put quite a lot of thought, time and effort into trying to find books that the younger boys I was teaching in the school would like because in essence, that was my job. I never measured myself by the GCSE or A level grades accumulated every year, but simply by the fact that it was my job to make sure the boys I taught left school with at the very least a respect for books, and at best a passion, that would last them a lifetime.

One of the problems is that the kind of novels marketed by publishers to schools for that age range are incredibly girly, and I very quickly learned to ignore them. I would number Philip Pullman among them. I found a few books that the majority of boys would enjoy, and interestingly Bill Bryson was one of the authors, and he does appear in the Boys into Books list, but in nine years I only found one book I could guarantee any boy aged about 11-13 would love. It was The Maneaters of Kumoan, by Jim Corbett. Corbett was an English diplomat who lived in India for much of his life in the thirties and there is a national park there named after him. In his spare time he killed man eating tigers and the occasional leopard. He was not a writer but his unassuming accounts of the expeditions and hunts he undertook to track down the maneaters, some after having terrorised whole regions and eaten over 200 people, are just breathtakingly exciting. I found even boys brought up in single parent, Islingtonian households, under the strictest no toy guns, veggie regimes, adored his book. If I tell you that his main assistant on these hunts was a springer spaniel called Robin, you will maybe get just a hint of why they liked it.