Culture

Listing page content here Anyone baffled by the conundrum of what to read on the beach this summer need look no further than A Much Married Man. This thoroughly good-natured comedy of manners is perfectly pitched so as to provide something for everyone: witty social observation, convincing glimpses into the worlds of high finance and fashion and plenty of lavish weddings. There is some sex, but not enough to offend the more squeamish reader. Like Trollope, Coleridge understands that money is as fascinating as love. The story concerns a banker, Anthony Anscombe, son and soon-to-be squire of a pleasingly ample Oxfordshire estate, which includes the ravishing Elizabethan Winchford Priory.

Listing page content here Sitting at the window shelling peasinto a battered colander between my knees(sweet, pod-swollen peas of early May)till suddenly I find I’ve slipped awaysixty years and vividly recallrough stone on bare legs astride a wallswinging sandalled feet, a summer tanon knees, arms, face and summer in my hair;a cat sprawled in the mint-bed asleep there;and tiny fruit which bud the apple tree.How genes shuck off the pod of memory:battered colander between her knees,the woman sitting shelling May- sweet peaswhere my Mendelian legacy began.

Listing page content here To meet Oswald Mosley was a most unpleasant experience. You knew at once that you were in the presence of someone who had lost touch with everything except his own ego. So he bullied, so he lied, denying that he had been a willing agent of Hitler, that he would have proved a Quisling in the event of a German invasion in 1940, or that he had ever been an anti-Semite. On a television programme with him once, I read out some of the foul things he had said on platforms in the Thirties; his eyes turned red with rage, and I saw that he would have done violence to me if he could. If I did not suppress the book I had written about his sister-in-law Unity Mitford, Mosley and his lawyers threatened, they would not be responsible for the consequences.

Oxford publishes, or has published, a number of anthologies of anecdotes relating to various professions. There is a very enjoyable one of military anecdotes, edited by Max Hastings, Elizabeth Longford’s of royal anecdotes (competing in a crowded field), and Paul Johnson’s of political anecdotes. Some professions more readily generate anecdotes than others. I could imagine an anthology of anecdotes about philosophers or doctors, but no one is going to buy The Oxford Book of Banking Anecdotes. A lot of serious-minded people probably disapprove greatly of the idea of an anthology of literary anecdotes. After all, full-dress scholarly biographies of writers are, in some circles, not regarded as particularly worthy enterprises.

Listing page content here Women in peril flit through the pages of traditional Gothic fiction, murmuring ‘Had I but known!’ as they fall for the wrong man, open the wrong door or apply for the wrong job. The poet Sophie Hannah takes the trusty formula in both hands, gives it a vigorous shake and uses it to produce something fascinating and original in her first novel. In this case the woman in question is Alice. Still reeling from the death of her parents in a car crash, she has married the dashing David and acquired a new family in the shape of his welcoming (and wealthy) mother Vivienne and his son Felix by a previous marriage. David’s first wife was murdered, but the killer was caught and is now in jail. Alice moves into the lavishly equipped family home.

The poet and storyteller George Mackay Brown was the son of the postman at Stromness, Orkney. His father John had also been an apprentice tailor before becoming the postman. George, in one of his poems, speaks of how ‘not wisdom or wealth can redeem/The green coat, childhood’. In his knowledge of every cranny of the Orkneys, but in particular in his feel for the town of Stromness, George retained some of the postman’s instinctual topographical grasp for the one dear perpetual place in which his genius was rooted. In the exactitude of his meta- phors, the flair of his tragic impulse, there is something of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, the pessimistic tailor ever struggling to say an Eternal Yes to life.