The one I'd keep.

Whoever put 1800 on this record wants a quiet word with me. It is 1871 and 1872, in eight parts, and the date matters, because half of what the novel is doing is looking back from the 1870s at people in 1830 who believe the future is arriving next week.

Right. I've read it more often than anything else in the index and I shan't pretend to be measured about it.

Dorothea is not the reason. Dorothea is why people give up early, and I understand that; she is insufferable at the start, and she's supposed to be. Lydgate is why I stay. A clever man with real gifts and a fatal ordinary weakness about furniture and about what a wife ought to be, ruined not by catastrophe but by a run of small expenditures and small vanities, each of them forgivable on its own. I have watched that happen to actual people. Eliot is the only novelist I know who gets the arithmetic of it right.

And Casaubon. Everybody laughs at Casaubon and Eliot will not let you. There is a passage where she turns and says, more or less, that he too had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference — and the effect of that, dropped into a comic portrait of a dry old pedant, is like being caught out. I've thought about that sentence in staff meetings, and about parents I disliked, and once about myself.

The gambling chapters. The auction. Mr Brooke's speech from the balcony, which is the funniest political scene in English and never gets quoted. Mary Garth refusing to burn the will. The Garths in general, who are the moral centre of the thing and are barely discussed, because they are happy and competent and very little goes wrong for them.

People call it difficult. It isn't; it is only long. The sentences are perfectly clear, there are simply a very large number of them. The one real barrier is the reform politics, and I'd tell a first-time reader to let all that wash past and to look nothing up.

What I did about it professionally: nothing, for years. It isn't a school book and I never pretended it was. Then in about 2007 a sixth former called Sasha asked for something long because she was going into hospital for six weeks, and I gave her my own copy, the Penguin with the cracked spine and my pencil all through the margins, and told her not to bring it back unless she wanted to. She brought it back. She had written in it as well, which I hadn't expected and didn't mind at all. Her notes sit next to mine in biro, disagreeing with me about Rosamond.

Rosamond, incidentally, is the great achievement. Not a villain. A perfectly ordinary young woman handed a set of expectations by everyone around her, unable to imagine another person's interior for so much as a moment. There are a great many Rosamonds. Some of them are men.

Ten. The card for this is full on both sides and I've had to clip a second one to it, which Ruth photographed and sent to somebody, apparently.