2015 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the complete Don Quixote of La Mancha—an ageless masterpiece that is unusually fertile and endlessly adaptable. Flaubert was inspired to turn Emma Bovary into “a knight in skirts”. Freud studied Quixote’s psyche. Twain was fascinated by it, as were Kafka, Picasso, Nabokov, Borges and Welles. The novel has spawned ballets and operas, poems and plays, films and video games, and even shapes the identities of nations.

In Quixote, Ilan Stavans, one of today’s pre-eminent cultural commentators, explores these many manifestations. Training his eye on the tumultuous struggle between logic and ... Read moredreams, he reveals the ways in which a work of literature is a living thing that influences and is influenced by the world around it.