Trigger warning: On the Road will make you carsick

A Coleridge poem has been issued with an alert for students, but why stop there, asks

The US writer David Sedaris tells the story of his sister Lisa refusing to see a film because she had heard that a dog gets killed in the first 15 minutes. “I reminded her that the main character dies as well, horribly, of Aids, and she pulled into the parking lot, saying, ‘Well, I just hope it wasn’t a REAL dog.’”

On behalf of Lisa – and, frankly, most English people – I am pleased that Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has been given a trigger warning by the University of Greenwich for depicting “animal death” when the mariner admits: “With my crossbow/i shot the albatross.” This is a poem in which many sailors die, some in quite imaginative scenarios, but it takes the betrayal of a seabird to get the eyes stinging. It’s because, as Lisa Sedaris says, “human suffering doesn’t faze us much”. We see ourselves parodied in Dame Mildred Porch and Miss Tin of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, trying to get 1930s Africa compliant with the RSPCA. As GK Chesterton once put it: “Wherever there is animal worship, there is human sacrifice.”

In the same spirit of radical honesty, other trigger warnings might also be of service. A few novels are famously harrowing for animal lovers – Black Beauty, Old Yeller, Animal Farm – but less publicised are the cruelties of Patrick O’brian’s Master and Commander, when Capt Jack Aubrey gives Stephen Maturin’s sloth some grog – most vilely – to calm it down.

Or Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which the protagonist Peter cuts his toenails in the garden, where he could let the clippings “fly free and fly they bloody well did... massive enough and fast enough to have brought down a sparrow on the wing”. Amis assures us that “so far this has not occurred”, but that will be no consolation to readers.

To Kill a Mockingbird should also be avoided on principle. And animal lovers will be exercised to read in Samuel Pepys’s diary that one night after heavy refreshment, Pepys “at home found all well, but the monkey loose, which did anger me, and so I did strike her till she was almost dead”.

Animals might not be your thing, but

Watership Down should still carry a warning for anyone upset by its depiction of England’s unsympathetic development. Billy Elliot will reduce to tears anyone yearning for a government strong enough to face down the unions. Those on the other side of the political divide may find Inspector Morse novels inflammatory for positive representation of the police. War And Peace may contain traces of war.

“That alluring fruit… plenty hung/ Tempting so nigh, to pluck and eat my fill”: Paradise Lost is really an allegory about snacking when you know you shouldn’t. Those on diets would be safer reading Jilly Cooper, where every plot involves a woman’s fortunes being turned around by weight loss (this, of course, is not recommended for those with eating disorders).

Anna Karenina is a novel to elicit strong emotion, not least in the hearts of railway commuters. Season ticketholders driven to the edge of sanity by intermittent service should avoid this novel about not one, but two, major disruptions in the Moscow terminus. Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile will bring back unpleasant memories for anyone who has taken a river cruise that didn’t live up to expectations: noises at night, bloodstains on the bar furniture, that sort of thing.

And avoid the passages in the Book of Genesis relating to Noah’s roundthe-world cruise, on which the accommodation was far less luxurious than the waiting list for berths would have led one to expect, and, reading between the lines, the whole thing devolved into a s--gfest. And don’t read

Moby-dick, if the idea of overfishing keeps you awake at night.

Friends less punctual than you are? Stay away from Waiting for Godot. Bleak House will be triggering for anyone in “probate hell”. Avoid The Chronicles of Narnia if fancy dress makes you anxious, or if you are allergic to (big) cats.

Modern slavers will be depressed by the business failure of The Mayor of Casterbridge, who only manages to sell one wife and one child, and dies unhappily. Robinson Crusoe will be depressing if you are a competitive gardener. Mary Poppins is a dangerous read for men who never “got over” their nannies. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road may make you carsick. If you have tinnitus, The Hunchback of Notre Dame will be a busman’s holiday. Epilepsy? Leave Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception unopened.

Of course, it’s good to feel something, sometimes, and the great thing about trigger warnings is they could help. Of Mice and Men, Bambi, and White Fang would all be there in the “WARNING: animal death” section of the library. And me? I’d be amusing myself in the “WARNING: child mortality” section for, as Oscar Wilde said of Dickens’s

The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

Paradise Lost is really an allegory about snacking when you know you shouldn’t