Judge a critic by the quality of his mistakes

What the title promises is not found inside. It is a tease. John Sutherland says he has ‘been paid one way or another, to read books all my life’, yet he does not regard himself as well read in the genre of novels. With two million languishing in the British Library vaults, nobody could be, he insists.

And although the publishers have given it the subtitle ‘A guide to 500 great novels and a handful of literary curiosities’, the author declares in his admirably succinct preface: ‘This book is not a guide.’ He’s right. It is an engaging game, or a compendium of games (as the Gamages Christmas catalogue used to describe a chess board with snakes and ladders on the back). I started off by seeing what the Prof thought of some of the books I like.

Of The Diary of a Nobody (1892), he makes the enlightening point that the ‘Nobody’ of the title is very hard to translate, being rooted in English class. It is true that the French inconnu doesn’t answer, but aren’t there hints of something similar in the Spanish antonym hidalgo ‘son of something’? Only an hidalgo could call himself ‘Don’. In Spain the book is known as Un Diario de Don Nadie. For me, the world is divided into those who identify with the Nobody, Charles Pooter, and those who despise him and side with his rebellious son Lupin. Though most unPooterish, Sutherland, perhaps with his Lupin years behind him, is glad things turn out well for Pooter.

Another great divide is to be found in A Child of the Jago (1896), the slum novel by Arthur Morrison about the no-go area for toffs, the Nichol, surprisingly near Bishopsgate. Does the narrator despise the people he describes, as moral freaks, or does he glorify their brutal lives? Sutherland quotes the still shocking description of a woman using a broken bottle in a fight.