Oxford

Yann Martel, the author of Beatrice and Virgil and Life of Pi, typically explores competing storylines, narrative reliability and the nature of truth. His new novel, Son of Nobody, pursues these themes in a first-person account written by a scholar who discovers a Greek epic. The narrator is a Canadian called Harlow Donne – a PhD student at a middling university. Offered an ‘unbelievable opportunity’ to spend a year at Oxford, he leaves home, his wobbly marriage and his young daughter. His doctoral supervisor repeats his habitual plea: ‘Just find something to say.’ He does. From ‘hints and scraps’ found at the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum, Donne stitches

Departure(s), whose publication co-incides with Julian Barnes’s 80th birthday, will be his last book, a thank you and goodbye to his readers. Barnes has blood cancer, but the condition is manageable and not terminal; when he dies, it will be with, and not of, the disease. Or rather, as he puts it: ‘I, in dying, shall have killed my cancer! Barnes 1, Cancer 0 – result!’ Otherwise he is in good nick and still master and commander of his narratives. He is bowing out because his body of work is complete: his 18 novels and two memoirs – or, depending on how Departure(s) is categorised, his 17 novels and three

It’s doubtful whether Asa Briggs ever had an idle moment in his life. Bestselling historian, pioneer of the new universities of the 1960s, chronicler of the BBC, champion of adult education, academic globetrotter and much more besides, he possessed phenomenal energy. He was a miracle of the kind of boundless enthusiasm that his Victorian hero Samuel Smiles had extolled in his book Self-Help. Short and tubby, with large glasses, Briggs effortlessly outpaced academic colleagues who tended to be left panting behind him. A joke did the rounds that if a word were to be coined for a unit of intellectual energy it should be an ‘Asa’. He was dubbed ‘the

This is a brave and learned book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of Africa; who has taken sides in the recent quarrel about ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, in Oxford or other parts of the world; or who wants to entrench themselves in contrary positions in our apparent ‘culture wars’. It is the biography of a vicar’s son, born in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire in 1853, who went as a teenager to Africa to join his elder brother who’d bought a plot of land in Natal. One day, walking past a stream by the side of a field, he noticed some pebbles gleaming especially brightly. They were diamonds.

Alexander Starritt has form with satire. His 2017 debut The Beast skewered the modern tabloid press, drawing comparisons with Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. For his third novel, Drayton and Mackenzie, he is back at it, mercilessly mocking everything from Oxbridge and management consultants to tech bros and new parents in a story that hinges on whether two unlikely friends can make a success of their tidal energy start-up. It’s more fun that it sounds. The narrative opens in the early 2000s with James Drayton – someone who gets his kicks by finishing his maths A-level exam in 20 minutes and who finds undergraduate life disappointingly basic. ‘He supposed he’d been naive

On 3 June 1960, a letter appeared in The Spectator which began: Sir, We are homosexuals and we are writing because we feel strongly that insufficient is being done to enlighten public opinion on a topic which has for too long been shunned. The letter was prompted by the government’s failure to act upon the recommendation of the 1957 Wolfenden Report that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence. This had led to the founding of the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS) in 1958, and it was for this organisation that the letter’s three signatories worked as volunteers. The letter was both unusual

What did the great Marxist historian Christopher Hill think of orgies? Michael Braddick’s splendid and judicious biography doesn’t ponder this question. However, it strikes me as worth posing since, for a three-week period in the winter of 1978, an ensemble of actors (including the future Hollywood star Bob Hoskins) could be found naked at the National Theatre simulating group sex in Hill’s name. The actors were performing in Keith Dewhurst’s radical stage adaptation of Hill’s masterpiece of 17th-century popular history The World Turned Upside Down (1972) and were embodying what it might have been like to be enthusiastic members of one of the radical millenarian sects at the centre of

Clarissa Churchill – as she was known until her marriage to Sir Anthony Eden – was brought up in a now vanished privileged world of intellectual, social and political London. In the introduction to his biography, Hugo Vickers provides a valuable roll-call of names. Those still living who knew Clarissa have proved invaluable sources of information, though a note of unconscious humour sometimes slips in – as when Antonia Fraser comments: ‘I was not quite glamorous enough for her’ (‘quite’ being the operative word). Born in 1920, Clarissa began life with the ostensible advantage of being a Churchill, the niece of Winston. In fact this was not the case: her

Nicholas Jenkins takes, as a point to navigate by in this rich and ingenious study of the early Auden, a remark by the poet’s friend Hannah Arendt. Auden, she said, had ‘the necessary secretiveness of the great poet’. You can’t always trust what Auden, in his prose and in his later interviews, claimed to have been getting at in the poems. And in Jenkins’s account, you can’t even trust what the poems think they’re getting at. Jenkins seeks to put Auden back in his own time, and embed the verse in his life. Auden said in public, for instance, that the first world war had little effect on him; and