A.N. Wilson's diary: The book that made me a writer – and the pushchair that made me an old git

Like many inward-looking children, I always doodled stories and poems. Knowing one wanted to be a writer is a different matter altogether. That moment came when I read Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria. I was sitting in the Temple Reading Room at Rugby. The final paragraph, in which Strachey imagined the dying Victoria at Osborne House, sinking out of consciousness as the scenes of her past life flitted through her brain, struck me as one of the best pieces of writing I had ever encountered. Fifty years on, an unworthy successor, I am about to publish my own life of Victoria. Mine is not hagiography but, like Strachey, and like almost everyone since who has ever written about this utterly distinctive woman, I fell under her spell. Cold turkey has set in. It feels so odd not to be trawling round the archives looking for the Queen’s unpublished letters, of which I have read literally thousands.