I read White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector in a matter of days. What a brilliantly touching, off-centre memoir, intelligent, funny and poignant in the right amounts, with real warmth, and written with a deftness of style that’s irresistible.

It’s seems to me as much a book about people as it is a book about books, and a certain subset of books and those bookshops in which they can be found, if one is lucky or just persistent. At its heart is an obsession for, but also an absolute love of and interest in, books—in terms both of their contents and as objects—and the world of writers and publishing. I got so much from this, and that collecting isn’t such a bad thing after all (my wife will be delighted...). I really didn’t want it to end, but it has, alas, and I’m a bit sad about that.