‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.’ So runs Robert Louis Stevenson’s well-known dictum. He might have said something different if he’d had a travelling companion like Jenny Diski. ‘One of the things about being a believer’, she writes of an encounter with an evangelical Christian, ‘is that you don’t give up hope. One of the things about me is that I do.’

Diski doesn’t travel hopefully: in fact she’d much rather be at home, preferably under the bedclothes. ‘All the places I imagine myself in are solitary, silent and visually appealing,’ she says before going on to say that the description fits her workroom perfectly. She describes herself as ‘sloth-like’ and ‘resistant