Arriving in London during the autumn of 1893, Emile Zola and his wife, Alexandrine, found themselves welcomed with the kind of pomp normally reserved for visiting heads of state. As guests of the Royal Institute of Journalists, the pair were whisked off to Westminster Abbey, the British Museum and the Greenwich Observatory and given a tour of the East End, whose slums seemed altogether less dismal to the novelist than those he had so graphically evoked in L’Assommoir. There was a banquet at the Guildhall, complete with trumpet fanfares and the Lord Mayor’s arm for Alexandrine, while huge crowds turned out for a Crystal Palace fireworks display featuring an illuminated portrait of the writer. ‘The English are charming,’ he concluded. ‘I have been acclaimed as I never have been in France.’

Only a few years earlier, this reception might have proved less ecstatic. Translations of his great Les Rougon-Macquart series, though abridged and bowdlerised to suit la bienséance anglaise, had been attacked in the House of Commons as ‘inartistic garbage’ and his valiant London publisher, Henry Vizetelly, was handed a three-month prison sentence for obscenity. Now, however, Zola found himself lauded as one of the 19th century’s genuine heavy­weights, someone who had compelled his own era to take stock of its dogmas and desires with pitiless accuracy.

He had always wanted to be a universal figure. How he squared up to this ambition is the subject of Robert Lethbridge’s Emile Zola: A Determined Life. It is not, in any sense, a standard biography. Rather, what the author seeks to show is just how many of Zola’s traits,