Partly in jest, the British Marxist writer and urban theorist Andy Merrifield commented, during one of the panels at last year’s Brisbane Writers’ Festival: ‘People who read a lot of Dostoyevsky, end up looking like Dostoyevsky.’ I didn’t need to check the mirror to feel suddenly self-conscious; the great Russian has been a constant reference point and companion throughout my reading life. I find time every few years to re-read his major novels, and my enjoyment shows no signs of weakening.

By the time he came to write The Devils (Penguin Classics), his tragic tale of bumbling political revolutionaries, Dostoyevsky was in the late, reactionary pahase of his life: a thundering old conservative putting too much faith in Russian orthodox spirituality as the path to national salvation. Yet his skill as a novelist and polemicist was undimmed; just as they say the Devil has the best tunes, so Dostoyevsky gave the best lines to those who represented the opposite views to his own. How refreshing, in these times of inflexible, social media-driven narrowing of political perspectives, to witness a writer constructing opposing viewpoints with such verve and profound human insight. I found The Devils echoing 2016’s strange year in politics again and again. It’s comedic too, like much of Dostoyevsky (despite his reputation), with its surreal, hilarious drawing-room set pieces where stately Russian nobility is disrupted not by revolution and nihilist ideology so much as by farce, eccentricity and borderline madness.