Not long ago, some thirty five years after that Mastermind competition, and faced with having to choose some pre-twentieth century literature to teach, I turned to Black Beauty, at last. Black Beauty was chosen for Year 7 competitors but as I did not have to produce the questions for it, I did not have to read it – though I still remember that the scope of the knowledge of the winner, Andrew (I think), was awe inspiring. In my first teaching job, in Barnsley, the English Department ran a Mastermind competition with selected books instead of specialist subjects. As a child, I watched the television series Black Beauty – longing, obviously, for a horse, which I never got - but I never actually read the book. Often, we imagine, because we know a little about a well-known title, that we have read it after all, we think we know the story.
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