In case you are wondering, I didn’t watch War and Peace at the weekend and while on that subject can I express my dismay at the outbreak of infantilism across the press concerned with which, if any, male members of the cast keep on their shirts?

The phwoar factor in this production is said to come in the shape of James Norton, as brooding Prince Andrei. Many column inches have already been devoted to this young actor whose talents I first noted six years ago at the Royal Court in Posh, Laura Wade’s satire on Oxford’s Bullingdon Club.

James, in fact, is himself rather posh (Ampleforth and Cambridge), one of the privileged few who seem to be taking over the acting profession.

Some witless woman writing in the Sunday Times said his performance in War and Peace was alone sufficient to justify her outlay on the TV licence.

I, too, pay this tax-by-another-name. This doesn’t mean I can watch the BBC’s television programmes, though, because my set only has a signal for Channel 4, Channel 5 and ITV2.

Even if War and Peace had been available, I would not have watched it, however, preferring the delights (see right) of the first in a new series of Endeavour, which I watched at the home of a neighbour.

Resistant to television adaptations of classics, which invariably dumb down the subject matter, I would far rather settle down with the original book – even if it’s a long and sometimes boring wade, as with War and Peace.

It is 20 years or more since I last (first) read it in the sunshine of Greece. Little of its content now sticks in my mind, suggesting that a reprise is due.

War and Peace, of course, along with Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, is generally name-checked when people consider the books they ought to have read but haven’t.

In the case of the critic James Agate (1877-1947), whose Ego memoirs I am reading at present, the novel is in his ‘might be supposed to have read’ category.

He offers a list of these in a letter sent in November 1944 to the Eton beak George Lyttelton, father of the later-more-famous jazz trumpeter and radio presenter Humphrey.

The prompting came in a letter from Lyttelton in which he referred to someone as “a sort of inferior Mr Casaubon”, then added: “How pleasant it is to feel that one of one’s correspondents is quite certain to have read Middlemarch!”

In fact, this one of his correspondents hadn’t read it, nor ever would.

“I belong to the school of George Moore; and he, you remember, held that GE ought to have been a policeman.”

Most readers are surely not of that school. I have twice read and enjoyed Middlemarch, and even watched the television adaptation, filmed in and around the lovely town of Stamford. Romola and Daniel Deronda are the Eliot novels I have never managed to crack.

Middlemarch apart, though, it is curious how many of my ‘non reads’ figure in Agate’s list, which follows in the order in which he gives it: Don Quixote, War and Peace, Werther, The Vicar of Wakefield, Gulliver’s Travels, Persuasion, Barnaby Rudge, The Virginians, Les Miserables, Edwin Drood, Fathers and Sons, Harry Richmond, Clayhanger, The Forsyte Saga, The Good Companions, Farewell to Arms, Ulysses, To the Lighthouse and A Passage to India.

I mention the order of the novels because up to and including Harry Richmond (George Meredith), I am almost entirely with him, but afterwards not at all.

Jane Austen’s Persuasion I have read, and Swift’s Gulliver as well, but only in the slimmed down version aimed at children.

Barnaby Rudge and Drood are the two novels by Dickens I have never managed, despite a number of false starts. Most of the others listed have never been attempted.

But Clayhanger is a favourite novel sequence by one of my favourite authors (Arnold Bennett) – hugely entertaining, as are Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga and JB Priestley’s The Good Companions.

EM Forster’s A Passage to India I completed (and liked) after many false starts. Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was managed only because it had to be – a GCE set book.