As a business school dean there are never enough hours in the day: in the morning you feel 20,000 leagues under the sea, by the afternoon it is as if you have travelled from the Earth to the moon, and the sleeping hours are often spent going around the world in 80 ... ideas.

Jules Verne would no doubt be delighted by this modern-day relevance of some of his most famous book titles and, I suspect, not in the least bit surprised. After all, in his novel Paris in the 20th Century, written in 1863 but published only in 1994, he predicts air conditioning, cars, the internet and television in forms uncannily similar to what we know today.