One of reading’s greatest gifts is the ability to see the world as others do: ‘temporarily borrowing someone else’s heart can help us understand our own a little better’.

As Robert Douglas-Fairhurst notes in his prologue, most of us think of reading as a skill like tying your shoelaces: it may not be easily acquired, but once you’ve got the hang of it, no further instruction is needed. Douglas-Fairhurst believes otherwise: for him, it is something we get better at with practice. After 23 years of teaching English at Oxford, he still experiences each new book as “a fresh challenge to my literary assumptions”. His own book strikes a fine balance between the demanding and the easily digestible. Each of the 33 short chapters focuses on a different aspect of fiction or poetry, from dialogue to atmosphere to descriptions of food, and explores it by analysing a passage from a classic text. His frame of reference is wide, encompassing Jane Austen’s Emma, Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.

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