I love Ghost Stations. I wish I’d written it myself. Its tones are civilised, funny and humane – too much so, perhaps, for our strident, merciless era to tolerate. The author is one of those ‘citizens of nowhere’ demonised by a recent prime minister. Born in Tunisia, Patrick McGuinness, half-Belgian, half-Irish Geordie, grew up in the Walloon town of Bouillon, went to school in Bristol and now divides his time between Wales and Oxford, where he teaches French literature. ‘I’m not at ease’, he tells us, ‘unless I know there’s a station nearby. Like a party guest keeping the door in view, I like to know where the exit is, even when I’m having fun.’

Movement, for McGuinness, paradoxically implies a chance to find balance and stillness where the rest of us grow fretful, muddled or merely exhausted. Throughout this collection of essays and sketches the railway station takes on a positively numinous significance, linked to the author’s absorption with worlds in a state of flux. ‘Anything on the spectrum of terminality, from the freshly stricken to the fully decomposed, interests me,’ he tells a journal interviewer. ‘I think things reach their apogee just as they’re about to collapse.’ He likes crossings, bridges and hinterlands, a world of becoming as opposed to just being.

Hence a fascinating triple portrait of Oxford, viewed not from a traditional university-centred perspective, but from its workaday fringes at Cowley, Osney and the Westgate Shopping Centre. Urban implosion under the gentrifying grip of buy-to-let makeovers arrests McGuinness on the Cowley Road, a zone whose otherness, with its Pakistani pharmacy,