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In 1988 I arrived in Pakistan a few hours after the assassination of Zia ul-Huq, the military dictator whose aircraft had been blown to pieces by a bomb. In most countries the violent death of a leader, who had dominated politics for more than a decade, would trigger soul-searching, or at the very least a determination to find out who had killed him and why. But within days of the assassination it was clear that there was little appetite to probe the latest chapter in Pakistan’s violent history. Zia was given a state funeral and quickly forgotten by his countrymen. Twenty years after his murder, the circumstances of his death remain a mystery.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (MacLehose Press, £14.99, translated from the Swedish by Stephen Murray) is the first volume of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Larsson was a journalist who sadly died of a heart attack before publication. But the books are selling in their millions across Europe and, once you read the first of them, it’s not hard to see why. The central character, Blomkvist, works for a hard-hitting magazine named Millennium. An attack on a corrupt Swedish billionaire has backfired, leaving him on the brink of financial and professional ruin. He accepts a lifeline in the form of a commission to investigate the disappearance of a teenage girl nearly 40 years earlier in an island variant of the classic locked-room mystery.

‘I am sorry to say that the generality of women who have excelled in wit have failed in chastity,’ wrote Elizabeth Montagu in 1750, after looking over the memoirs of her contemporary, the witty Mrs Pilkington. Mrs Montagu, learned, respectable and rich, curled her lip at poor Laetitia Pilkington, who started writing for pure pleasure but was then forced to use her pen to keep afloat in a harsh world. She died soon after Mrs Montagu’s comment, and her reputation remained dubious. In the old DNB she was described as an adventuress.

‘Being Roman,’ declares Catullus, the poet protagonist of Counting the Stars, ‘is a state of mind’. As in earlier novels — The Siege, House of Orphans — Helen Dunmore allows the reader to enter the ‘state of mind’ of a specific moment in history. Here, Julius Caesar’s Rome, in all its squalor and grandeur, brutality and sophistication, is made available to us in a way that is almost wholly convincing. Dunmore constructs her narrative from Catullus’ poetry. In less skilful hands this would seem laboured, but Dunmore is a poet herself and the joins don’t show. Catullus is obsessed with Clodia, the ‘Lesbia’ of his poems. Clodia is ten years older, married and a mother.

The Wessex novels of John Cowper Powys — Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933), Jobber Skald (also published as Weymouth Sands, 1935) and Maiden Castle (1937) — must rank as four of the greatest ever to be written in our language. Even those who do not feel ready for the 1,000-page novel based on Arthurian Britain, Porius (1951) which some consider to be the master work, it should be clear that here we have a truly major figure. Every now and again there is an attempt at a revival. A brave publisher will reissue one of the novels and print on the jacket the plaudits which Powys has received: ‘The only novels produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’, wrote George Steiner.

No one would be allowed to have J. G. Ballard’s career nowadays. When you consider the life of the average English novelist, what Cyril Connolly called the poverty of experience seems almost overwhelming, as the budding writer moves from school to university to a creative writing MA and on to the two-book contract. It is as thin a body of lived experience as the average Labour Cabinet minister possesses. Reading J. G. Ballard’s autobiography, you sometimes need to pause to remind yourself just how young he was at the time of many of the atrocious events described. At the point where most English autobiographies are just beginning, as the subject leaves university, enough horror has been lived through by Ballard to supply a lifetime’s imaginative transformations.