Francis Spufford

It's like watching a kind of bricklayer at work where every brick is a pleasure and all is kind of pleasure times 10,000.

Pleasure, mind you, in umpteen different flavors.

So it's not all sweetly, happily pleasurable.

There's some harsh and sour pleasure in there too, but there's nothing in there that doesn't

give joy as a made artifact.

And that's a touchstone book for me because I don't think you could ever quite arrive there, but you could try to approach the condition in which all your sentences gave pleasure.

George Eliot, still among the greatest books ever written.

Virginia Woolf said, only novel in the English language written for adults.

Not quite true, but you can tell what she means.

She was not wrong.

a book with this astonishingly wide embraces of human experience and almost close to universal sympathy, even for challenging and repellent and unattractive and seemingly dull people.

There's something in Middlemarch which is my ideal for a kind of universal sympathy.

You can get it from Tolstoy too, but Middlemarch is my kind of

home team go-to version of it.

Yeah.

Well, also, it's one of those books which changes depending on the age you are when you read it.

So I first read it as a school set book when I was 17, thereabouts, and thought,

making notes dutifully as I went, kind of, ooh, fascinating on social change, yes, interesting use of point of view, yes, ooh, the chartists, changing perceptions of science and all of that.

And then I came back to it much later when I was nearly 50, and it had, while I was away, become bitchily funny throughout, which I just failed to notice.

Sorry, George.