TAKE it as read that Edward Fox makes an entirely convincing Anthony Trollope as you could imagine gracing a leather armchair at the Athenaeum.

What also makes this evening so satisfying is the genius of the selection and juxtaposition of extracts from his novels and autobiography.

These two hours will surely have been enough not only to confirm the prejudice of the most seasoned of Trollope buffs. They also served to inform those who have but dipped a toe into Trollopian waters that they are deeper, wider and more deliciously warming than they might have realised.

Each of the extracts chosen by Richard Digby Day, who devised and directed, is either a key passage that encapsulates the novel or, from the 1880s’ autobiography, casts a wry light on the life of the GPO administrator turned renowned literary figure.

So we’re there when hapless Rev Harding decides that only resignation from his almshouse sinecure in The Warden will ease his conscience – “Resign?” said the bullying archdeacon and son-in-law “in a whisper that Macready would have envied”

– and when, in the less well-known Dr Thorne, Lady Arabella shamelessly admits that unless her son “marries money, he is lost”.

There’s ironic humour in the earl’s rescue from a bull-goring in The Small House at Allington and, in Framley Parsonage, a moving account of clerical poverty. Trollope, who reckoned The Last Chronicle of Barset his best book, writes that, after the sudden loss of his domineering wife, Bishop Proudie kneels: “I think he was praying that God might save him from being glad that she was dead”.

This is a tour-de-force by Fox.

At 73, he is routinely described as distinguished.

Rarely is the word used more accurately about an actor in terms of both achievement and appearance.

Peter Ridley