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In Sybille Bedford’s book, Jigsaw, a woman who is suffering from insomnia asks for books. ‘Oh, not real books, I couldn’t look at those. Detective stories only.’ So Sayers’ Wimseyland and Christie’s Poirot are required. How would she get on today? Ruth Rendell and P. D James would do excellently but none of these books would do at all: they are all thrillers, packed with blood, murder and mayhem, a nightmare diet. No time for quiet little grey cells to be working away here. Charles Maclean’s Home Before Dark is a particularly disturbing example of the genre.

It was the late Lord Deedes who once succinctly explained to me what it was like to live through the second world war. I had said to him, ‘Those Battle of Britain boys were so brave’.And he had replied, almost impatiently, ‘No, it wasn’t bravery we felt. It was a strange, deep, primitive compulsion that we were up against it. We had our backs to the wall. It was us or them.’ To any defender of Irish neutrality during the second world war — among whom I would count myself — the Deedes doctrine explains everything. It particularly illuminates Winston Churchill’s leadership.

Lorenzo de’ Medici was proverbially ugly. Machiavelli, describing an encounter with a particularly hideous prostitute, compared her looks to his. He was tall, well-made and physically imposing but contemporaries dubbed his features ‘homely’, his face was bony and irregular with a long crooked nose, a jutting pugilistic jaw and dark piercing eyes. In compensation, ‘his intellect and taste’ were outstanding. He wrote poetry in the Tuscan language, read Plato and other classical authors, whom he discussed with his circle of poets and philosophers, discovered the young Michelangelo and patronised Botticelli.

The ghost of Harry Lime seems to be haunting the publishing houses of London. Graham Greene’s infamous anti-hero may have come to a sticky end in the Viennese sewers but his spirit lives on in several debut novels immersed in the noir world of post-war Europe. Hedi Kaddour’s Waltenburg (Harvill/ Secker, £20) is the most wide-ranging and ambitious of these. The book begins with the maelstrom inflicted on a French cavalry unit during the Great War before coursing through the second world war to the principal narrative of a 1950s CIA operation. The Hotel Waldhaus in the Swiss mountain village of Waltenburg proves the hub around which a German writer, an American singer, a French journalist and a shady, unidentified mole love and betray one another.

This is the tribute of a child to a parent, especially commendable when the very concept of fatherhood is threatened; rarer still, the co-authors are themselves artists in their separate fields. Peter Mann is responsible for the pleasing design and photographs, and Sargy Mann has answered his son’s questions to provide an autobiographical text which largely concerns visual perception, ‘not at all straightforward even when you can see’, as Peter Mann says. Jean Renoir’s Renoir, My Father is the prototype. Sargy Mann selected and discussed 27 paintings or series of paintings covering his career and Peter Mann has photographed them as they hang today in private houses. This novel idea is also indebted to Renoir, who told his son: You don’t look at a painting.

Ordinary mortals marrying into the upper reaches of the Royal Family are usually in for a rough ride. Their best chance seems to be to come from one of those families which privately consider that they are every bit as good as the House of Windsor: Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott (though the formula proved a conspicuous failure in the case of Lady Diana Spencer). Otherwise they must decide whether they will opt for the deferential role, sidling through life perpetually two steps behind their royal spouse, or try to retain an independent career and existence. To do the latter successfully calls not merely for strength of character but a high degree of tact and patience and a capacity for unobtrusiveness.