For literature, 1984 was a very good year. Not in the 1922 league (after The Waste Land and Ulysses, nothing was the same), but still significant.

The Booker Prize jury played safe with the small and wistful canvas of Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, but the book in which the literary tectonic plates felt a palpable shift was Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot.