Comedy

My daughter when small came home from school one night singing these extraordinary lines: ‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me/ And will thy favours never lighter be?’ My daughter when small came home from school one night singing these extraordinary lines: ‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me/ And will thy favours never lighter be?’ Five hundred years on, this Tudor ballad, said to have been played at hangings, provides the theme, and the structure, of Seasonal Suicide Notes. Only, this being the 21st century after all, it is bawled, not from a cart to Tyburn but from a converted convent in Bromyard, being Roger

The habit of dividing the past into centuries or decades might be historiographically suspect, but by now it seems unavoidable. And it is possible that, because we now expect decades to have flavours of their own, they end up actually having them. We change our behaviour when the year ends in 0. Can there be anyone who has never used ‘The Twenties,’ ‘The Thirties,’ ‘The Fifties’ or ‘The Sixties’ as historical shorthand, expecting his interlocutor to know exactly what he means by it? By comparison with the Sixties, the flavour of the Seventies is indistinct and muted. Everyone is agreed that, for better or worse, the Sixties now represent the

Free association underpins the comedy of Lorrie Moore’s writing — or perhaps the verb should be ‘unpins’, since her prose spins off in tangential, apparently affectless riffs. Free association underpins the comedy of Lorrie Moore’s writing — or perhaps the verb should be ‘unpins’, since her prose spins off in tangential, apparently affectless riffs. Even the title of A Gate at the Stairs tugs in different directions. It is a baby-gate; since this novel starts as a comedy — of sorts — about adoption. (But, as the adopting mother says, while mashing flower bulbs into a poisonous puree, the French ‘have jokes that end “And then the baby fell down

Home to Roost and Other Peckings by Deborah Devonshire, edited by Charlotte Mosley As Alan Bennett says in his introduction, ‘Deborah Devonshire is not someone to whom one can say “Joking apart . . .” Jok- ing never is apart: with her it’s of the essence, even at the most serious and indeed saddest moments.’ And so, of course, this book is full of jokes: the Chatsworth gamekeeper who used to refer to the Duke of Portland as ‘His Other Grace’; the agent at Bolton Abbey who every year used to put a final item on their bill for the unconscionably expensive August grouse shooting: ‘Mousetraps — 9d’; the ladies

Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman It was the second or third time that I ever saw Kind Hearts and Coronets that I noticed in the opening credits: ‘Based on the novel Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman’. It prompted a ten-year search for the book in secondhand shops that finished in a dusty corner of a Suffolk village more than a quarter-of-a-century ago. I am not given to hyperventilation, but on that occasion came perilously close to it. I have never seen another copy, and a search on the internet returns only pleas by would-be readers to find them a copy. Mine is the 1948 reprint, with an introduction by Hugh

Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents, by Robin Laurance What might seem an obviously Christmassy book is Robin Laurance’s Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents (Quercus, £9.99); but it is mainly about birthday presents. One thing that it doesn’t include is a present I saw advertised in Los Angeles when I lived there in the 1980s: a silver dustbin studded with precious stones — ‘for the man who has everything and wants to throw some of it away’. What the book does have is the things given by X to Y on every day of the year. An odd assortment