[Culture minister Margaret] Hodge has spent the past six months in a consultation process that asks some unsettling questions. What, really, is the point of a public library in the 21st century? How should libraries respond to today’s 24/7 culture and the greater availability of cheap books? Why can’t that beardy librarian double as a barista?

What has been done to public libraries in the United States is now being done to public libraries in Britain.

As it happens, I have myself sometimes been the recipient of such abuse: if, that is, one can be said to be the recipient of anything that remains in the virtual world alone. No subject is too recondite to provoke the insensate rage of those who disagree with the view the author has taken of it. Indeed, it sometimes seems as if fury leading to ill-mannered personal abuse and foul language is the predominant mode of disagreement in our society, at least among those who append their comments to an article that appears on the internet.

Dillon is an unusually dexterous writer. Each of his slim chapters focuses on a different artist or thinker, and each fully evokes the subject’s fears and afflictions, showing how they’re reflected in his or her life’s work. Charlotte Bronte, for instance, was beset by headaches, chest pain and nervous, melancholic breakdowns that became a central theme of her fiction and tended to lift when she finished a novel.