Welcome to The Word This Week, a roundup of what is happening in the world of literature, ideas, and festivals.

On October 28, 1726, English readers first met Lemuel Gulliver, the invented narrator of a travel memoir secretly written by Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. It was an instant hit, read, as the poet John Gay put it, “from the cabinet council to the nursery.” Three hundred years on, that diverse readership has endured. While abridged children’s editions, sold since the 1770s, usually only keep Gulliver’s adventures among the tiny Lilliputians and the giants of Brobdingnag, the full book includes a flying island of scientists and land of wise horses, which scholars read as a satire about the politics, religious feuds and vanity of Swift’s era.…