I don’t quite know why, but having been a voracious novel-reader in my teens, I more or less stopped reading fiction in my 40s. This turn-away from the fictional is not entirely mysterious: it has coincided with belated grapplings with philosophy, and with more stringent quality control. These two are probably linked; like everyone else, I suddenly noticed time speeding up in my 40s; the years pass more quickly (though also, on balance, more pleasurably), the hours are running out, and there is simply not time to waste on mediocre fiction. Recent novels by much-praised authors such as Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith have left me either bored or cold. If I am going to get stuck into a novel, it had better be something really good: and I would rather revisit a great work than plough through a new second- or third-rate one.

My recent reading of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway was a kind of rereading: I got halfway through the (not very long) book five or six years ago and then stopped. This was not to do with the often miraculous quality of the prose; it was connected with the content. As everyone knows, Mrs Dalloway is set on a single June day in London in 1922; the day Mrs Dalloway has a party and sees her old lover Peter Walsh, returned from India; the day her husband has a political luncheon with Lady Bruton; and the day the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith commits suicide by jumping out of a window on to some railings.