George Eliot’s Middlemarch and I have had a difficult relationship. Forty-five years ago, having just passed my entrance exam, I went up to Cambridge in the snow-engulfed Winter of Discontent to talk to my director of studies about what I should read before starting my undergraduate English degree: “Middlemarch,” he replied in an instant, in a tone that suggested I shouldn’t have had to ask. It was, he added, simply the finest novel in the English language.