Polly: Question is whether you hate the coach party because they're like the dogs or hate the dogs because they're like the coach party. - Alan Bennett

However, living in Tel Aviv, he was spared the fate of equivalent figures in English culture, an endless round of arts programmes where those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will be remembered only for remembering someone else.

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.

If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.