I do have, in actual book form, waiting for me The Every by Dave Eggers. I imagine I wouldn’t like the Whizzer and Chips Annual quite as much as I did back then. It has passages of intense beauty, and also – in a way she never quite managed elsewhere – the most satisfying and elegant structure of all great books. I can hear all of Eliot’s yearning and pain and nuance about time and tide and marriage and compromise and the pressure of the social order. Now, in my late 50s, I think – unoriginally – it is indeed the greatest novel written in English.

And to do that he’s prepared to go sentence after sentence refining complexities of mood and thought and expression. Now it’s clear to me that James was inventing psychological modernity in the novel. I read a fair amount of James, particularly when I was doing a PhD in Victorian literature and sexuality, but although I found him interesting, I also found him soulless and convoluted. I’m presently reading, or rather listening to, The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. It converted me to the idea that, as Updike puts it, the job of art is to give the mundane its beautiful due – that if you are a good enough writer, your prose can make everything, even the most microscopic and ordinary things in life, rich and strange. Again when I was 18, I read it without realising it was part of a sequence of books, Rabbit Is Rich. In the book, this is primarily about art(particularly how images of women in art are utterly encoded with the male gaze) but I took from it an understanding that nearly everything we create, indeed think, has an underlying unconscious ideological component. It introduced me to the idea that what we assume to be natural is often ideological.

The ways of seeing book