Peter, as my dear friend, you know that no one need defend Anthony Trollope, my most beloved writer, to me. But it’s a simple fact that there are, throughout his 44 novels, a variety of very minor characters — moneylenders and the like — who are simply drawn in classic anti-Semitic caricature. In that sense he was an anti-Semite. But such portraits are not disqualifying, as I indicated before, because they do not indicate any kind of fixation on Jews as the cause of worldly woe. As for the Project Gutenberg version of The Way We Live Now, if there’s a single person who can read that gigantic novel online all the way through, I salute him and his complete lack of any kind of ADD. But I have to say you’d really have to be cuckoo to spend the untold hours printing the whole thing out yourself on your computer.

My advice for Trollope newbies: The Warden. It’s great, and it’s only 250 pages long. Or Framley Parsonage, the greatest work ever written on the subject of getting into debt, which is about 350 pages.