Culture

Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough, by Richard Davenport-Hines There was something not quite right about Lady Desborough. Richard Davenport-Hines, in this intelligent and well-written book, extols her charm, her wit, her courage, her vitality, her infinite capacity to convince any man that he was uniquely talented and the only person with whom she was concerned. The roll-call of her conquests — Balfour and Asquith, Churchill and Kitchener, Kipling and Siegfried Sassoon — attests to her potent and widespread appeal. Beatrice Webb, a woman who might have been expected to deplore everything that Ettie Desborough stood for, paid tribute to her ‘great organising capacity ... iron will, excellent temper and methodical mind’.

The Guardian, bless it, has a super feature asking a judge from each of the Booker Prize's 40(!) years to recall their experiences as a member of the panel. It's a terrific read and well worth your time. (One surprise, to me at least, the amount of love shown JG Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur). Anyway, some highlights to encourage you to read the whole thing: 1969, Frank Kermode:Getting through the 60 was made easier by our not daring to take on Dame Rebecca [West]. "Miss Murdoch writes good and bad novels in alternate years," she said. "This is a bad year." Muriel Spark: "clever but too playful." And out they went.1974, Ion Trewin:We were three judges - AS Byatt, Elizabeth Jane Howard and me.

Via Clive Davis, the Washington Post offers a list of five great unfinished novels. As you might expect The Man Without Qualities and The Last Tycoon are among those who make the cut. One that's missing: the novel that was shaping up to be Robert Louis Stevenson's masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston. What other novels should be on the list? Second question: which unfinished novels were better left that way? That is to say, which, had they been completed, would be the most painful or distressing to read? One that leaps to mind: Raymond Chandler's Poodle Springs. Chandler had only written four chapters when he died and technically, Robert Parker finished it or him.

True North: Travels in Arctic Europe, by Gavin Francis This is an old-fashioned travel book of the linear variety. Roaming the northern fringes of Europe with a tent and a nose for a story, Scottish doctor Gavin Francis looks beyond the icebergs and the stunted willow seeking ‘a back country of the imagination where myth and reality intertwined’. Beginning at Unst, the northernmost of the Shetlands, Francis sets out to ‘follow a route that Europeans had taken towards what they once saw as the very limits of the world’. Heading by ferry to the Faroes, he continues to Iceland, Greenland, the snowy hinterland of Scandinavian Finnmark, and finally Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago that includes Spitzbergen.

Fine just the way it is: Wyoming stories by Annie Proulx The realism of Annie Proulx’s fiction is an extraordinary phenomenon. Realism in a novel has never been the same thing as plausibility, and her novels and short stories are full of bizarre and unforeseen events. The violent extremity of a great deal of her narratives sometimes verges on the territory of urban myth rather than anything recognizable as everyday life, and she enjoys characters considerably beyond the ordinary territory of the grotesque.

The Balloon Factory by Alexander Frater This is a curiously enjoyable book. Its structure is very odd for it is basically two books bolted together across 100 years: the first is the high drama of the dawn of powered flight in Britain as young men, and some not so young, fall out of the skies; the second is tea time, as Alexander Frater completes a stately trundle, interrupted by his own flying lessons, around the locations, and nearby hotels, where these events took place, but so few remember that they did. The effect is remarkable, for it puts into historical context the story of flight, seven-eighths of the entry about which in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica is to do with birds.