I came across this book in a village on the plain, and I traded a few rupees and a Bible for it. The man who owned it didn’t know how to read. I suspect he saw the Book of Books as an amulet. He was of the lowest caste; people could not so much as step on his shadow without being defiled. He told me his book was called the Book of Sand because neither sand nor this book has a beginning or an end.

The stories of Jorge Luis Borges are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. The questions of time, space and infinity are often interwoven into the pages of a book – with a hint of magic. Many are familiar with The Library of Babel whichthe second part of the novel where the protagonists themselves have begun to read the the first part of the Quixote. In other words, they have seen themselves within the work of fiction as a work of fiction! As Borges describes, ‘the protagonists of the Quixote are, at the same time, readers of the Quixote.’

This theme continues in a variety of historical works, including, famously, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play in which the audience watches a play within a play – a performance that seems to echo the tragedy of Hamlet itself. But where the idea of an infinite book is really epitomised is in the Thousand and One Nights, where Scheherazade, a virgin married to the sultan who is due to be decapitated at dawn, distracts the king