Nevertheless, Borges’s idea provided a powerful tool for further deconstructionist analysis. Would not our view of Samuel Beckett’s work be both deepened and enriched if it were to be postulated that he had also written a humorous weekly column for the The Irish Times, styling himself Myles na Gopaleen and arranging for delivery and payment through an alcoholic Dublin novelist who went under a string of aliases ranging from Brian O Nuallain to Flann O’Brien?

They loved him, it went without saying. Ugo’s great insight had been that the way to people’s hearts was to flatter them. He did it in class, and even more so in the series of erudite fictions which had turned an obscure professor of semiotics at a provincial Italian university into one of the richest and most famous authors in the world. Impress the pants off them with your range of knowledge, then leave them feeling that they’re more intelligent and sophisticated than they ever suspected, and they’ll always come back for more. With his academic peers worldwide he adopted a subtly different approach, appealing not to their cleverness-they were in no doubt about that-but to their often non-existent charm, humanity and sense of humour. Even they, who didn’t much like themselves, let alone anyone else, loved Edgardo.

His phone rang. It was Guerrino Scheda, his lawyer.

‘ Ciao Guerrino. Good news, I hope.’

‘I think so. It’s a little unusual, and I don’t as yet have anything in writing, but I’m reasonably hopeful that I’ll be able to pull it off. In which case it would be the perfect solution.’