I just happened upon it the other day – my Penguin Modern Classics edition of James Joyce’s Dubliners. Far from being a shiny, pristine copy, however, this was the dog-eared, scruffy, paperback that I’d had when I was studying literature as an undergraduate way back in the day. I flicked it open and was amazed to see how many notes I had written in the margins, most of them in red biro for some bizarre reason, and some quite extensive. I smiled as I recalled my then boyfriend one day running his eye over a book I was studying and, with all the literary appreciation of someone who was do...