Now well into the final quarter of the adventures of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, and enjoying every moment. It took a while to genuinely get into Cervantes's epic - the digressions in the first half didn't make for entirely gripping reading - but the second book has just gone from strength to strength. It feels like reading Wodehouse in certain ways: you are a happy guest in an enchanted world that you really don't want to leave.
At this point Sancho and the good Don have been temporarily separated with everyone's favourite peasant showing how a kingdom should be ruled in a treatise on governance that effortlessly puts Machiavelli in his place. But the genuinely princely Panza and his tetchy lord will be reunited soon and we can go back for a time to the first spinning place, the garden from which we have all been exiled.
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