The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. Andy Miller

something subtly different to whoever picks it up. ‘We are all such shocking poseurs,’ writes Arrowby, ‘so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.’ Murdoch had taken an ingredient from her own kitchen table, a practical joke, and mixed it in with all her other fascinations – her eccentricity, intelligence and spirit lived on in the book, just as the master lived on in his novel.

      The Sea, The Sea was liberating in a more practical way, too. Having tried my hand at a few of Arrowby’s nastier dishes, I could now see no reason not to attempt some authentic cooking of my own. Perhaps it would be nice to make dinner for my own spouse one evening. But where to start?

      One of the cookbooks I had bought at the height of my folie de cuisine was a 1930s classic called Cooking with Pomiane, by the French chef and epicure Edouard de Pomiane, which was written in a grandiloquent register every bit as fruity as Charles Arrowby’s – except of course that one author was fictional and the other flesh and blood. Take, for example, Arrowby’s musings on haute cuisine:

      ‘It may be that what really made me see through the false mythology of haute cuisine was not so much restaurants as dinner parties … Haute cuisine even inhibits hospitality, since those who cannot or will not practise it hesitate to invite its devotees for fear of seeming rude or a failure. Food is best eaten among friends who are unmoved by such “social considerations”, or of course best of all alone. I hate the falsity of “grand” dinner parties where, amid much kissing, there is the appearance of intimacy where there is really none.’

      This rings true, doesn’t it? Now compare the fictional Arrowby with the historically verifiable figure of Pomiane on the same subject:

      ‘First of all, there are three kinds of guests: 1. Those one is fond of. 2. Those with whom one is obliged to mix. 3. Those whom one detests. For these three very different occasions, one would prepare, respectively, an excellent dinner, a banal meal, or nothing at all, since in the latter case one would buy something ready cooked … To make a dinner for people one can’t bear is to try and keep up with the Jones’s, as you say in English. Whatever you do, you are bound to be criticized, so it is better to buy ready cooked food and let the supplier be criticized instead.’