It evokes an educated, creative taste, in a way that is safe and blandly mainstream similar in effect to carting a Sally Rooney tote bag around town. Yet, a Modigliani nude is also exactly the kind of print a university student could find at a freshers’ poster fair, snuggled alongside Che Guevara and Audrey Hepburn. This, of course, is exactly how Melissa and Nick’s thirty-something life appears to Frances and Bobbi at the novel’s outset. A Modigliani print is supposed to suggest a sophisticated, bohemian adult who enjoys long dinner parties, red wine, and cigarettes before bed.

The print is a perfect choice, and not just because both Rooney and Modigliani are connoisseurs of brunettes with unreadable expressions and elongated limbs. But, at this stage of affairs, it simply indicates to Frances a fully-realised state of adulthood she is yet to enter. In the opening pages of Conversations with Friends (2017) – Sally Rooney’s debut novel that is so culturally notorious it hardly needs even this introduction – 21-year-old protagonist Frances spots a ‘Modigliani print hanging over the staircase’ of Nick and Melissa’s semi-detached house in the Dublin suburb of Monkstown ‘a nude woman reclining.’ Knowing the extra-marital tangle that is to come, the prominent nude might seem to carry a hint of eroticism (of a passive and tepidly cultured kind that would, in all likelihood, appeal to Rooney’s typical readership).

There’s welcome space for the actors to convey emotion that isn’t expressed through dialogue.A more complex emotional picture emerges in the new TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s debut novel There’s forensic attention to interior worlds, to the roiling thoughts and feelings beneath the surface, the desires, tensions, jealousies and resentments. There’s also a deliberately unhurried pace, allowing viewers time to absorb the nuances of the relationships, to focus on the characters’ expressions, gestures and silences.

Perhaps anticipating the criticism that it’s another dive into the petty problems of privileged white folk is the casting of Bobbi as a black expat New Yorker. And again there’s a European vacation, this time a fourth-episode trip to coastal Croatia (changed from the French countryside in the book). Again, there’s an uncomfortable affair driven by sexual desire and there are evident economic differences between Melissa and Nick and the financially constrained college students. Watching the two series, or reading the books, one can detect Rooney honing her craft and her concerns. Nick (Joe Alwyn) and Frances (Alison Oliver) share an intimate moment in Conversations with Friends.

Conversations with friends about