A magnificent seven

Being a creative fantasist is not a simple matter, although a grudging and no doubt envious Dr Johnson maintained about Gulliver’s Travels that when once you have had the idea of Big Men and Little Men then the rest was easy. Satire in this context may come easy enough, but effective and touching fantasy does not. Gulliver’s little Brobdingnagian nurse Glumdalclitch is more memorable than any satiric morals that Swift may draw from Gulliver’s voyages; and the poor beetle of Kafka’s story Metamorphosis is just that — a beetle person with whom we can all feel a degree of sympathetic identification when we wake up in the morning.

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