Tomorrow, it will be 100 years since the writer Franz Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna from tuberculosis – and the good news is that as major literary anniversaries go, this one is easy to mark. You could, for instance, simply read him: a short story, perhaps, or a few pages of Ross Benjamin’s new, uncensored translation of his diaries. If you’re in Oxford, where his papers are in the Bodleian Library, you can see a new exhibition about him, and gawp at his sputum jar and a syringe of the type with which those treating him used to inject cocaine directly into his larynx; you might also wander in the city’s University Parks, where a giant inflatable “Jitterbug” – like Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, it is half man and half insect – has appeared, as if from outer space.

Or you could just go about your regular life, and wait for the K-word – Kafkaesque – to float, unbidden, into your mind. The newspapers or........

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