‘What did you do on your holiday?” My truthful – and almost complete – answer to the question was that I ate, drank, slept and read.

Not swam? Well, only to the extent that an occasional brief tip was taken as a refreshing interlude between the other activities. And, since temperatures on Naxos were topping 100F on some days, this was only too necessary.

For reading material I relied in part, as often before, on the trusty Kindle which was loaded with the classic fiction – Victorian in the main – that I so enjoy.

Highlight this time was a novel, previously unknown to me, by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu, whose work has given me much enjoyment over the years.

The Cock and Anchor was his first novel, published in 1845 when he was 30. It is a historical work, in the style of Sir Walter Scott, whose Jacobite sympathies he shared.

Rich in period detail, the story is set in and around Dublin in the early 18th century, a time of significant trouble involving the catholic population and their protestant British rulers.

Politics, in fact, takes a back seat in the drama, though we are permitted to sample exchanges between Jonathan Swift and Joseph Addison, a feat of invention only a novelist of Le Fanu’s calibre could achieve.

The focus is on the high-rolling, doom-dealing activities of a rakish aristocrat whose vile behaviour leads ultimately to an episode of false imprisonment reminiscent of that in Uncle Silas, the writer’s best-known work.

This well-written book is fast-moving, exciting and often surprising. In all respects it outclasses another of my holiday reads, a novel by Wilkie Colllins.

The Dead Secret was serialised in Household Words, though one suspects it might not have been, had its editor been other that Collins’s boon pal Charles Dickens.

Someone else might have observed that the Secret (thus capitalised throughout the book) is really no secret at all, in fact easily guessable in chapter one. Still, I read on . . .