Our very own Mark Lawson began his spirited dash through the life and times of Daniel Defoe (14 July) with an inspection of the subject categories in Hatchards, Piccadilly. His genre-hopping quarry turned out to be well-nigh omnipresent, represented in children’s books (Robinson Crusoe), travel (A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain) and history (A Journal of the Plague Year) among other areas.

And all this, Lawson assured us, was to ignore some of the obscurer byways of a trajectory that took in newspaper editing, pamphleteering, espionage and a role in the negotiations that brought out the Act of Union in 1707.