The book’s leanness feels like part of its aesthetic its thought-space is uncluttered and unfussy, and everything is lightly, delicately done. Intimations is a slim volume – just six essays, most of them only six or seven pages long, the penultimate one is an assembly of smaller sketches, “screengrabs”, portraits of individuals encountered on the street or in the park. There isn’t all that much explicitly about the pandemic, or Black Lives Matter, and yet everything feels conceived under the pressure of those things

That, too, was a compendium of city-fragments, gathered up inside the same humane, keen curiosity, the same writerly close attention, the same empathetic flare of response to other lives. The book that came to mind sometimes as I read was Doris Lessing’s London Observed, which I loved 30 years ago. But Intimations feels more intimate than those earlier collections.

She’s glamorously immersed in contemporary culture as well as richly intellectual and well read, her inner landscape encompassing “Kafka and Prince … Malcolm X and Aneurin Bevan”. In her other essay collections – Changing My Mindand Feel Free – she’s a brilliantly assured cultural critic: we need to know what she has to say about books and art and music, and all the politics and life mixed up with those. “Talking to yourself can be useful,” she says in her foreword. She doesn’t lay down the law, she argues with herself, so that the movement of her writing feels like the zigzag passage of perception inside a quick mind, not in love with its own opinions, uneasy with certainty. She writes as she thinks, and she thinks crisply and exactly, not in abstractions, but through the thick specificity of people and places, fragments of story. Smith is a wonderful essayist she’s a natural. Although it’s born out of the pandemic and the lockdown, it feels like a doorway into a new space for thought.

But whichever way it turns out, I think this collection of little pieces by Zadie Smith will endure as a beautiful thing. Or maybe not: maybe as the new world becomes the new normal we’ll want to hurry forward, away from our first intuitions of change, shedding them behind us because nothing’s so stale as the news from last week. T here are probably going to be a lot of lockdown books.

Intimations six essays