It takes a book like Suzette Field’s A Curious Invitation: The Forty Greatest Parties in Literature to remind us of the absolute centrality of social entertainment to the way in which a literary classic works its spell.

Ms Field, who pursues a second calling as a bohemian party-planner, had the bright idea of subjecting some of the great literary shindigs to professional analysis – who came, the nature of the venue, what was eaten, drunk and said, what happened afterwards – and the findings enable her not only to deconstruct some of the patterns that a certain kind of social life regularly throws up, but to identify some of the techniques that novelists use in bringing these complex interactions to the page.