The list-making king of 90s male fiction is back with an extended essay on two of his favourite people in Dickens & Prince: A Particular Kind Of Genius. A little like this year’s The Two Dylans, Nick Hornby puts two titans of the arts together and makes a case for their similarities as creators of some of the world’s most enduring books and albums.

But where KG Miles and Jeff Towns attempted to find links between Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas, Hornby masterfully sets up his argument by showing just how different these two, now mythical characters – Prince and Charles Dickens – are.

At times this can be a little frustrating, as Hornby references other writers and theories that he claims, basically, prove nothing. But what emerges is an attempt to understand, as the subtitle would have it, A Particular Kind Of Genius.

Both were workmen, driven to produce, neither slapdash nor perfectionist; their main similarity is an ability to work at a phenomenal pace. But what sets them apart was that (nearly) everything they produced was to an incredibly high standard. Background is given as to why this might be the case and, in using this central argument as a focus, the life of one does shed light on that of the other. Dickens & Prince is a clever, persuasive piece of writing.