While studying for my English Literature A-level in the mid-1990s, I was asked to submit an essay on a text of my choice. I went for an iconic work with themes of eternity and transience, the burdens and benefits of family and the inseparability of creation and destruction.
But Miss Allsobrook rejected my pitch for Neil Gaiman’s fantasy epic The Sandman, on the grounds that the text needed to be a work of literature. If I needed any sort of vindication that The Sandman was worthy of an A-level lit crit essay, it has been provided many times over from the critical adulation heaped on the work in the years that followed.