Isn’t it strange the way the popular and high art aspects of our culture keep connecting and intersecting. A friend of mine with French to die for – she can interview Catherine Deneuve, she could interview Jeanne Moreau – put on her phone the actors of the Comédie-Française reading the whole of Proust in French but also that irresistible trash story The Three Musketeers.

Thackeray was the author of Vanity Fair, the history of the rise of that wicked woman Becky Sharp, and it is a dazzling acerbic work of art.