THE ADVENTURES OF MY SOUL among masterpieces, Anatole France called his literary criticism. Flaubert put it slightly differently. “I read,” he said, “in order to live.” Hurrah for those Frenchmen! We could always do with a bit of that spirit.
A paradox of our age is the number of book festivals which have sprung up in a world obsessed by the image. There is barely a town in the land which does not have a week of events devoted to the written word, yet ours is no longer a literary
