A few years ago the podcaster Lex Fridman published a list of books that he was hoping to read in the year ahead. It included works by George Orwell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Hermann Hesse and others. If he had published this in the world of print media he might have got back some encouraging noises. But because he put the list online – worse, on the platform then still known as Twitter – he received mostly mockery. ‘Who hasn’t read Animal Farm?’ was the general tenor of the blowback, as though a man who had been a researcher at MIT was next to being a neanderthal.

I watched that passing storm with interest because one of the things that often strikes me about people who presume themselves to be well-educated is how often they feel the need to give off the impression that they have read, heard and know everything. As if at some stage between the cradle and the end of their formal education the whole canon was downloaded into their heads.

Several things result from that, not least that it probably puts some people off trying at all. So reading, listening and looking closely at art become cordoned-off areas, available only to those who already know almost everything. Tell somebody that you have just listened to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 and that it’s really, really good, and you’re likely to be greeted as either a pseud, a fraud or a gibbering idiot. Who hasn’t heard it already? Besides, who expresses enthusiasm about something we all know – or are meant to........

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