There was a moment in 1988 when James Wood, then 23, considered staying on at Cambridge to do a PhD. He had earned a first in English and could have graduated into academia. Instead, he looked to his Guardian student journalism award, won – largely for criticism – the year before and gambled on what he called the “romance of living by the pen”. If James Wood were a novel, a beginning like that would presage a barbed comedy of misfortune certain to teach our hero any number of unromantic lessons. If, on the other hand, after a series of fantastic triumphs, the protagonist were to become the pre-eminent literary critic of his generation, while remaining the kind of person with whom one would happily have a drink, a reader might be forgiven for dismissing the story as born of hysterical optimism.

But, as so often, what seems improbable in fiction turns out to be true in life. Wood’s chief obstacle lay in persuading the paper that had given him the journalism award to let him write about books. The then editor of The Guardian, Peter Preston, responded that, yes, Wood could live a life of borderline dereliction in Brixton punctuated by the odd, finely spun essay for a literary magazine but that, on the whole, he should consider beginning as an apprentice reporter: book reviewing was not a proper occupation.