I’ve just come to the end of one of the slowest novels I’ve ever read. It’s astonishing to think that The Last Puritan was once a Book-of-the-Month Club bestseller. The only novel by the Spanish-American philosopher, poet and cultural critic George Santayana now seems like an expansive product of the Edwardian era, though it was published in 1935. Leisurely as it is,it packs a surprisingly hard punch – at least at the end. A more sustained attack on the American puritan ideal has never been penned.

Santayana was the man equipped to do this because of his unusual background. He was born in Spain to Spanish parents, but when he was eight his mother moved to Boston, the home of her first husband, and Santayana, who spoke no English when he arrived in America, lived there for the next 40 years, becoming a professor at Harvard.