Culture

I have never met Roger Scruton, though I would like to; wine fans are slightly obsessional and enjoy clustering together, like trainspotters, though tasting rooms are more welcoming than the end of a platform at Crewe. We’re also very different. Shortly after I, working for the left-of-centre Guardian, became the wine writer for this conservative magazine, Scruton, a right-wing philosopher, took the same job at the New Statesman. Given the rivalry between these two organs, I took a keen interest in what he wrote. For instance, round about the same time that he pointed out that ‘it is almost impossible to find a decent Burgundy these days for less than £30’ we were selling El Vino’s own-brand Velvin for £3.95.

I knew that I was onto a good thing with this book before the page numbers were even out of roman numerals. Describing the wealth of new material that has come to light in the three decades or so since the last biography of Thomas De Quincey, Robert Morrison men- tions the areas in which it has enriched our understanding: . . . his enduring sorrow over the loss of his sister Elizabeth, his masochistic desire for humiliation; his association with prostitutes; his pursuit of, and subsequent alienation from, Wordsworth and Coleridge; his struggle with drugs and alcohol . . . his horrendous battles with debt; his imprisonment in Edinburgh gaols . . . This was a lively life, and this is a lively Life.

I've had Wilkie Collins on my To Read list for, well, for years now. Somehow it's never happened. And with a dozen or so still-not-finished books at the moment it would be foolish to add another to that menacing pile. On the other hand, it's 150 years since The Woman in White was first published by Charles Dickens's All Year Round (Does exactly what it says on the tin...) and so really one ought to read it this year... The first episode appeared in the issue of November 26th 1959.Now some canny fellows are "re-publishing" the novel in serial form. Each week's episode will be available to read online here and you can also email them and they'll send a PDF of the chapter to you every week. Hurrah for the internets! The web, in fact, would seem made for the return of the classic serial.

From a letter written by the American novelist F. Marion Crawford, on August 23, 1896: The old fashioned novel is really dead, and nothing can revive it nor make anybody care for it again. What is to follow it?...A clever German who is here suggested to me last night that the literature of the future might turn out to be the daily exchange of ideas of men of genius—over the everlasting telephone of course—published every morning for the whole world.... As Marbury says, that's a pretty good description of the internet, though, of course, access to the everlasting telephone is scarcely restricted to men of genius... But Crawford - who seems to have been an interesting chap himself -  was wrong.

Ferdinand Mount Andrew Brown has spent a lot of his life writing about religion, not least for The Spectator. He has never written anything remotely like Fishing in Utopia (Granta, £8.99), but then nor has anyone else. The book tells the story of how the author fell in love with Sweden and everything Swedish, including his first wife, the fishing and the socialism. And when he falls out of love, it is not a straightforward disillusionment, but rather a rueful recognition of how hard it was for a country of dirt-poor farmers to emerge as an industrial nation without losing some of the idealism in the affluence. The descriptions of fishing are as enchanting as anything since Izaak Walton, but in its light and easy style the book is as profound as it is enchanting.

The first world war was the last major conflict to be brought to an end in the traditional fashion, with a formal treaty of peace. Or, rather, several treaties of peace, one for each of the defeated belligerents. They were all negotiated in Paris, but named after the various royal palaces in which the signing ceremonies were held: Versailles, the Trianon, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Neuilly, Sèvres. These great buildings, arranged like pearls in a necklace around Paris across the hunting grounds of the former kings, were built to impress. But the treaties signed in them were arguably the most prodigious acts of folly in the history of European diplomacy. The process began on a note of high morality, with President Wilson’s Fourteen Points.