Would I have joined the Greek class? Instantly. Shamefully. Yes.

Read it in the July heatwave with a fan pointed directly at my face, which is exactly the wrong weather for this novel, and I'd do it again.

Here's my position on the six of them: they're appalling. Snobbish, cruel, wildly pretentious, mostly horrible to each other, and I'd have moved into that house inside a week and been grateful for the invitation. The clothes! The dead languages! The total absence of anyone doing laundry!

Bunny is a nightmare and the book knows he's a nightmare, which makes the middle a deeply uncomfortable place to live for a fortnight. You're told what's happened on the first page, so all that's left is watching them come apart, and Tartt takes her time over it in a way that never once bothered me.

Where it loses marks: Camilla barely exists as a person and I closed the book with no clear idea what she wanted, and Richard is such a blank that I kept forgetting he was in the room.

Anyway, the practical outcome was that I bought a second-hand Greek grammar from a stall on the Cowley Road, which is now on the pile with everything else, unopened, mocking me.