Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year resonates with our new way of life

‘You can easily spot the bibliomaniacs among the readers, and we tend to egg each other on’

‘It turns out I have a local authority lending library in part to thank for setting me off as a writer’

‘The best translations can be miracles in and of themselves’

"This was the great discovery: that books could let you in to places of danger. Perhaps inevitably this included places you regretted having gone"