Bitter Experience Has Taught Me, by Nicholas Lezard – review

What, really, is a literary education for? What’s the point of it? How, precisely, does it help when you’re another day older and deeper in debt?

These are questions that after a while begin to present themselves with uncomfortable force and persistence to those of us who have believed from our earliest youth that if literature will not save us, it will,  surely, at least do us some small, perceptible good.