The steady disclosure of the plot is the principal pleasure for most of us in reading a novel. It is therefore irritating, to say the least, when this is revealed almost in its entirety, in one glance at the cover of the book.

I complained many years ago in Gray Matter that my enjoyment of Anthony Trollope’s Ayala’s Angel had been spoiled by the blurb-writer of the Oxford University Press. Central to the story is the heroine’s indecision over three rival suitors. Which she eventually chooses was — astonishingly — divulged on the back of the book.

By a curious coincidence, a similar complaint was made soon after, concerning another OUP-published Trollope novel, by the Mail on Sunday’s star critic, Craig Brown. We were able to share our thoughts on the matter when I met him a few weeks later at a party.

In the years since, I have come across very few further incidents of this sort and have noted with approval, too, how introductions to novels are often prefaced with a warning that the plot is given away.

One of these might usefully have been placed before the introduction to Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise — concerning department store life in Paris — as published by the OUP in its World’s Classics series. This discloses an important plot detail that is revealed only in the novel’s final paragraph.

Since I generally read introductions after finishing a book, this was no bother to me; but I had already spotted that the ‘blurbiste’, in Craig’s happy coinage, had given much of the game away in a few lines on the cover. These say (and prospective readers of The Ladies’ Paradise should skip this paragraph and the next two): “Octave Mouret, the store’s owner-manager, masterfully exploits the desires of his female customers.

“In his private life too he is the great seducer. But when he falls in love with the innocent Denise Baudu, he discovers she is the only one of the sales girls who refuses to be commodified.”

Now, Mouret’s falling in love with Denise, I can confidently assert after reading the book, is not evident until you get at least three-quarters of the way through its 432 pages.

When there is a reprinting of the novel (perhaps to capitalise on the interest generated by its use as the basis of the BBC1 series The Paradise) may I please request that the spoiler be removed.

The Ladies’ Paradise is one of the best novels I have read by Zola, offering a picture of department store life similar in some respects, but without the comedy, to that found in television’s Are You Being Served?. Also missing is any character in the mould of Mr Humphries, memorably created by John Inman.

Oxford Mail:

Good read: But don't look at the back cover

It is an odd feature of the fiction of Zola — for all its vaunted verisimilitude — that male homosexuality is absent from its pages. One commentator has noted: “Zola not only created no gay male characters, he deliberately avoided a study of male homosexuality when offered the opportunity. In 1889, he received a letter and accompanying diary from a self-loathing young Italian homosexual who wrote that ‘I would have been a delightful and adored woman . . . but am only an incomplete and monstrous being’. He urged the novelist to turn his talent to a portrait of one such as he; Zola handed the diary over to a doctor who was working on a study of ‘inversion’.”

I read The Ladies’ Paradise during a recent holiday in which my many idle hours were largely occupied with Victorian fiction. The stand-outs were Trollope’s Mr Scarborough’s Family — a story of contested inheritance, brilliantly told — and Wilkie Collins’s The Black Robe, a tale that gives full rein to the its author’s dislike of the Jesuits. Both these books, and a number of others, came free of charge to my Kindle which made for a lighter suitcase. (Alas, the device was left by me in the seat pocket on the return flight from Athens and is still being sought at the time of writing.) Reading in this way also meant there were no blurbs to consult while making my selection of the books. Now this led to another problem . . .

At the recent Oxford Literary Festival, the happy task fell to me to introduce Robert Harris to the audience at the Sheldonian. Afterwards, he presented me with a generously inscribed copy of his novel, An Officer and A Spy. This concerns the Dreyfus Affair, in which the aforementioned Émile Zola played so brave a role. The book was one of the best I’ve read in ages and convinced me that it was high time I caught up with other parts of Harris’s oeuvre on the Kindle.

My choice fell on The Million Dollar Girl. This started with a vividly described plane crash but quickly (and puzzlingly) transformed into a story of school life reminiscent of the sort of tale I used to read in the 1960s in my sister’s comic Bunty. As you may have guessed, it was from the pen of another writer with the name of Robert Harris. Confusing, eh?