At two o’clock on Saturday morning I got chatting to an official in the bar at European Union headquarters in Brussels. Several floors above us, the leaders of the 27 EU countries were still arguing about how to change the text of the Union’s ill-fated constitution. “If you want to understand what they are doing,” mused my friend, “you should look at Nabokov’s book Pale Fire”.

It struck me that I was unlikely to find a copy of the great Russian émigré’s 15th novel lying around at that late hour, so I settled for the next best thing – an internet search. A short critical essay that I came across immediately brought to mind some striking similarities between Pale Fire and the draft agenda for revising the constitution.