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You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio Scarpia, portrayed on stage as a ‘sadistic agent of reaction’, a cut-throat murderer who enjoys drinking his victims’ blood from their skulls and, as one of my opera-loving Kensington pals puts it, ‘not a nice bloke at all!’ In fact you may not even recognise him in these pages. Here Scarpia appears as an all-round human being, kind-hearted, handsome, likeable, occasionally lonely, even destitute, who also just happens to be a brilliant swordsman and man of action. Brought up in Sicily, his first act of daring is to rescue a girl who has been captured by Barbary pirates, even if it means stabbing her lover in the stomach.

On 13 March 2014 a congregation of 2,000 people, including many of the great and the good, gathered in Westminster Abbey for a memorial service for David Frost, who had died suddenly six months previously while travelling on the Queen Mary to America. During the service a select band, led by the Dean of Westminster, John Hall, retired to Poets’ Corner, sacred to the memory of Keats, Shelley and others of the immortals, where the Prince of Wales laid flowers on a tablet in the floor bearing the illustrious name of Frost. Given that in only a few years’ time Frost’s name, along with many of today’s celebrities, was likely to be forgotten, it might have been better to dedicate the tablet ‘To the Unknown Television Personality’.

Considering that it was, as Melvyn Bragg rightly puts it, ‘the biggest popular uprising ever experienced in England’, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 hasn’t proved particularly attractive to writers of historical fiction. Pierce Egan, better known for his essays on boxing, wrote an interminable novel called Wat Tyler in 1841, and Robert Southey produced a dramatic poem of the same title which he later disavowed. William Morris took another hero of the revolt, the itinerant preacher John Ball, as his inspiration for a time-travelling socialist fantasy; and that’s about it. Historians and political thinkers in the centuries after the revolt have often tried to redress the balance of the unrelentingly hostile monastic chronicles that first told the story of 1381.

Martyrdom, these days, does not get a good press. Fifty years ago English Catholics could take a ghoulish pride in the suffering of their 16th-century Tyburn heroes, but in a western world that has learned to be wary of extremist talk of ‘holy war’ or the intoxicating visions of the martyr’s crown that fuelled the prayers of England’s young exile priests — ‘the supreme privilege, of which only divine grace could make them worthy’, as Evelyn Waugh put it — somehow makes for less comfortable reading.

This book is a serious bit of kit. Its hard covers measure 28.9 by 21 centimetres, and it weighs 1.62 kilograms — 324,000 times the amount of valium, we learn on page 98, that Tom Clancy needed to appear on Good Morning America (‘Sorry to wimp out, but, shit, I was scared’). The illustrations are beautiful. Very often they are simply the letters themselves (don’t worry about handwriting, there are transcripts too), but sometimes they reference the content. For instance a photograph of butterflies accompanies the biologist Rachel Carson’s letter about watching said creatures with a friend..

Beatlebone is an account of a journey, a psychedelic odyssey, its protagonist — at times its narrator — John Lennon, seen through the prism of Kevin Barry’s imagining. Barry’s first novel, The City of Bohane, was a dystopian nightmare of comic vernacular and violence, showered with praise and prizes. Think James Joyce and Flann O’Brien collaborating on a script for Tarantino. Beatlebone, his second novel (on the shortlist for the Goldsmiths prize for fiction) has Lennon fleeing New York in 1978 for a secret visit to Dorinish, the uninhabited island he bought 11 years earlier. Burned-out, creatively blocked, he craves a few days of solitude, to sit and stare at the surf. And scream. (In 1970 Lennon and Yoko took a course of Californian Primal Scream therapy.