Listen up, I’ve got this great idea for a book. It goes like this: for two thirds of the book I write about my commute to and from work, throwing in some stuff about the history of the underground to fill things out a bit, and then for the final third I write about my summer holiday. There, what do you think? Reckon I could get a publisher to stump up 20k in advance?

Sadly, probably not (although, if you’re a publisher and you like the idea and, more importantly, are willing to give me a 20k advance then let me tell you about my other idea for writing about my school run and the weekly shop).

But that’s pretty well what Tim Parks does in this book. To be fair to him, he’s a fine writer and he argues, reasonably convincingly, that any human enterprise is necessarily so conditioned and embedded in its culture that to look, in detail, at that enterprise is to potentially understand the whole culture that produced it. However, he really is writing about his commute in to work (from Verona to Milan, so a long way) and what he did on his summer holidays (go and visit the south of Italy).  This can’t help but strike me as a writer blagging his way towards a subsidised holiday – and good luck to him, there’s few enough perks to being a writer nowadays. Well done, Tim! Now, if you read this, could you let me know which editor you sold this to at Vintage. I need to tell him just how fascinating the Piccadilly Line is.