My lifelong delight in the novels of Anthony Trollope began with a childhood reading in a Collins Classics edition of Barchester Towers, the only work in his extensive oeuvre which was then (c. 1965) widely available.

This was slightly before the BBC’s brilliant adaptation of the Palliser series. starring Susan Hampshire and Philip Latham, which introduced his work to a wider readership.

The six books were fashioned for the screen, incidentally, by Simon Raven whose own novel sequence, Alms for Oblivion, was simultaneously revealing him to be a master of the roman-fleuve.

A later generation still was turned on to Trollope by the BBC adaptation of The Way We Live Now, with a tremendous performance by David Suchet as the Robert Maxwell-like figure of the corrupt financier Augustus Melmotte. Suchet – where’s his knighthood? – was later (2007) to show us the fat fraud himself in another television star turn.

These political state-of-the-nation works are great novels, of course, but for simpler joys of character and landscape, I still return to Barchester Towers and the rest of the Barsetshire series.

One of these is Dr Thorne, which was recently turned into a popular ITV series scripted by Julian Fellowes and starring Tom Hollander – raised in Oxford and educated at Abingdon School – in the title role.

On a recent holiday – ever eager to seize on a fat Trollope – I took along The Small House at Allington. I hadn’t read it for perhaps 20 years and had forgotten how good it is.

True, the author shows his usual disfiguring delight in status and titles – his love of lords, or better still dukes, is laid on in spades. He rejoices, too, in the slaughter of wildlife in various forms. But this is Trollope embracing the attitudes of his Victorian readership. Let us not judge him by the saner standards of today.

In other ways, in fact, the novelist shows himself to be significantly ahead of his times. His prose, for instance, is always concise and direct, with pithy thoughts delivered in a way that would not disgrace a modern journalist.

The book contains a more than usual (for Trollope) measure of authorial intervention, and is the better for it, in the revealing of a lively mind and warm personality, and a tolerance of human frailty distinctly un-Victorian in tone.

His relaxed approach to language is reflected in an observation at one point by his beguiling heroine Lily Dale. She tells her mother: “I fancy I do like slang. I think it’s awfully jolly to talk about being jolly. Only that I was afraid of your nerves I should have called him stunning. It’s so slow, you know, to use nothing but words out of a dictionary.”

The stunner in question is young Adolphus Crosbie, who becomes engaged to the doting Lily, only to dump her the next week for what he perceives to be a better match with the younger daughter of an earl. This suggests the possibility that her childhood love, the appealingly boyish Johnny Eames, may make it to the altar with her.

Fulfilment of this depends, financially speaking, on the pander-like figure of a bachelor aristocrat with whom Johnny is a firm ‘favourite’. The use of that word suggested to me a degree of homo-eroticism in the older man’s attitude to the younger.

Lord de Guest is first charmed by the lad when he finds him asleep on his land. His admiration and gratitude grow when Johnny rescues him from a potentially fatal attack by one of his bulls. His lordship says of him: “I have taken a great fancy to him. He is an uncommonly good -looking young fellow, straight-made, broad in the chest, with a good honest eye.”

Tellingly, perhaps, Johnny remains robustly single.

An interesting scrap of social history comes in the novel when Trollope muses on the monotony of a chap’s constant thoughts of his true love. “The mind will turn away,” he writes, “to Aunt Sally.”

This is not, of course, a reference to a person, but to the pub game – played almost exclusively in Oxfordshire – which for a few brief seasons became all the rage among the fashionable set in London.

It is thought to have been exported thither by smart undergraduates at precisely the time (1864) Small House was being written.