Some hot-potato topics show no sign of cooling and the array of personal recollections, private concerns and cultural commentaries are built to last. Granted, the books and films under scrutiny are no longer new releases, but Smith’s assessments remain fresh and valid. There are no period pieces to be found here, nor a supply of quaint ideas and outmoded beliefs. These essays were written during the eight years of the Obama administration and as such are “the product of a bygone world”.

This time we get simply 'essays' – more varied than before and a lot more assured. There is nothing 'occasional' about its contents. Feel Free, her second collection of essays, is thicker and longer than Changing My Mind, packing in as it does many meaty pieces for The New York Review of Books and the columns Smith wrote for Harper's Bazaar. Since that collection Smith has upped her non-fiction output – so much so that to refer to her merely as a novelist is to sell her short. The day job was still fiction, but now and again Smith would surprise, and impress, with a short, incisive extracurricular offering. They were, for the most part, irregular writings, side projects and stop-gap pieces penned during the seven-year lull between the novels On Beauty and NW. But intentionally or not, the other meaning of 'occasional' also applied to those essays. Z adie Smith's first book of non-fiction, Changing My Mind (2009), was a collection of so-called 'occasional essays' – a playful twist on occasional poetry or poetry commissioned and composed for a specific occasion.

Feel free essays