Why, of all people, defend the dilettante ? An amateur at best, a flighty rascal at worst: why take an interest in someone whose own interests are never more than a passing hobby? These are serious times – why take seriously someone for whom nothing is serious?

Merriam-Webster defines the dilettante as ‘a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge’. Encyclopedia.com calls the dilettante someone who cultivates an interest ‘without real commitment or knowledge’. Cambridge settles for someone whose understanding ‘is not very deep or serious’. Collins gives us someone who ‘seems interested in a subject … but does not really know very much about it’. None of it is flattering.

Clearly, the dilettante is no aspirational character. No university markets itself as training the next generation of dilettantes; no magazine runs a ‘dilettante of the year’ issue (except, perhaps, for the excellent Idler publication).…