Culture

If this had a third act it would make a superb film, for the cast list is virtually a re-run of Front Page, with Richard Addis, formerly of the Daily Express, now, magically, of the Canadian Globe and Mail, as the hard-bitten editor Walter Burns, and Stephanie Nolen, a young and eager reporter on the paper, as Hildy Johnson. It starts with an editorial conference, which, if you are unfamiliar with such things, is a sort of daily re-enactment of a high command meeting underground with tanks in the suburbs of their capital. In our time it is a scene made for black comedy.

How's this for a good opening? 'I took out a gun and painted the bullets gold.' If that were a novel the author would win prizes; but he isn't a novelist, he's a nutcase. Let's call him 'J'. J was convinced that his wheelchair-bound grandmother was a vampire. He visited her one morning, did her laundry and asked if there was anything else he could help her with. She said 'No'. So I put on my suit and shot her in the heart. She was wiggling and screaming at me. Then I shot her three more times real fast. After this he laid her body on the bed, drank some of her blood, uttered a prayer and torched the house. What makes this testimony so vivid and compelling is the detail: the laundry, the suit, the prayer.

In June 1959, A. L. Rowse was sitting on a train in the United States, writing up his journal. He was in the middle of describing an enjoyable encounter with Elizabeth Bowen in New York. Unfortunately, he was interrupted by a young woman asking if the seat beside him was vacant. Rowse indicated with his pencil that 'There is a vacant seat, across the gangway.' 'But I want the one by the window.' 'I am sitting by the window,' I replied, still not looking up. 'Oh, I see', she said, and moved on. A trivial incident, and you might have wondered why the great Elizabethan historian, autobiographer and Cornish poet chose to record it in his diary.

In a recent column in the Telegraph (8 March) headed 'How I long for the bombs to start falling,' Mark Steyn wrote, 'This interminable non-rush to non-war is like a long, languorous, humid summer, where everyone's sweaty and cranky and longing for the clouds to break and the cool refreshing rain to fall. Bring it on, please.' I don't know whether the Telegraph or The Spectator will be sending Steyn to Iraq, but this is what he may find. The description, in Jarhead, is by Anthony Swofford, a US Marine Corps sniper in the last Gulf war. Marching across the desert he comes on what is left of an Iraqi convoy which had been bombed by the Americans: 'Men are gathered dead around what must have been their morning or evening fire.

Who was Hannah More? William Cobbett called her an old bishop in petticoats, and she was the subject of a hefty, pious Victorian biography, since when she has been pretty much forgotten. The Edwardian wit Augustine Birrell buried 19 volumes of her collected works in his garden for compost. She owes her disinterment to the fashion for writing the lives of women, the more obscure the better. Is she interesting enough to merit a book of nearly 400 pages? Almost certainly, the answer is yes. She was born near Bristol, the daughter of an impoverished charity school master, in 1745. Her older sisters ran a successful school for young ladies. Hannah, who was reassuringly plump, wrote poetry. Aged 28, she published a best-selling poem, and went to London.

The legendarily catastrophic life of Julian Maclaren-Ross has tempted biographers before. But the task of pursuing him, like the Hound of Heaven, through the sordid backstreets, rented basements and sodden saloon bars of his progress has always proved too much of a challenge. It is an extraordinary story of profligacy and waste which has been told, up until now, only in a million awed anecdotes and fragmentary glimpses of this Neronian figure. This biography is not quite what one might have hoped for, but I have to take my hat off to Paul Willetts for his sheer industry in following his subject to places where few literary biographers need to tread.

The start of this book is extremely annoying. On page three there is an inept echo of Gibbon, which has the effect of making us observe that Elon's style is greatly inferior to the high culture which he sets out to describe. On page four there is a patronising remark about Moses Mendelssohn, the first great German Jewish man of letters, who, we are told, was passionate about social justice 'for a man of his time and place'. None of those benighted men of the Enlightenment could be expected, of course, to attain the degree of passion about social justice that moves us now. We begin to fear we are in the hands of a liberal so complacent that he does not even know he is complacent. On page seven, we get our first snatch of Heine.

The Emma of the title was an intrepid young woman who journeyed to the Sudan in search of exotic adventure. Owing to an ill-chosen marriage she found herself at the centre of a bloody civil war. A few years later she met with an early death. One's loins need to be well girded before embarking on this book. Emma's Sudan, portrayed by Deborah Scroggins, is a nightmarish, Goyaesque picture. During the 1980s, Emma McCune left her dreary Yorkshire village to work as an aid worker in the Sudan in search of thrills, romance and Sudanese men. She found an abundance of all three, although her job with the British Voluntary Service Organisation was ostensibly to teach children English and art. Aid workers are described by Scroggins as naive but well intentioned at best, wicked at worst.

In life, it helps to be called Rothschild. Victor Rothschild discovered this well before he became associated in the public mind with think tanks and spycatchers. Visiting the United States as a 29-year-old Cambridge academic in 1939, he was received by President Roosevelt, as well as by the Secretary of State, the Treasury Secretary and the Director of the FBI. Although an MI5 officer of only middling rank, he entertained the prime minister to dinner in wartime in a private room at the Savoy Hotel. At a humbler level than this, he made it his business to know an astonishing range of civil servants and politicians, artists and writers, journalists, lawyers and academics.

Jonathan Bate, the general editor of this series, which replaces the Oxford History of English Literature, announces in a preface how exceptionally difficult it is to write literary history at all in modern times. As the slightly awkward new title of the series suggests, there is all that American, Scots, Welsh and Irish stuff now. They need more than the odd chapter, so away with them. Hundreds of dead women writers are now actually in print who were formerly unheard of. Distinctions between high and low culture have collapsed. Competing theoretical approaches raise terrible anxieties. Evaluation itself is under threat. So the task of writing the history of Eng. Lit.

Asked who was the greatest French poet AndrZ Gide famously replied, 'Victor Hugo, hZlas!' I confess to having had similar feelings about King Lear. Of Shakespeare's four great tragedies I find it the bleakest and least sympathetic, with the most exasperating protagonist and the most preposterous sub-plot. The naivety and perverse behaviour of young Edgar are hard to credit. Wrongfully estranged from his father Gloucester through a blatant trick played by his bastard brother - something a moment's explanation could have put right - he hastily flees and takes on the disguise of a garrulous, mud-caked lunatic. Gloucester's later on-stage blinding often cited by defenders of video nasties - 'Shakespeare got there first, you know!' - is for me artistically ill-judged.

Those who prefer their history straight may look askance at the historical novel, particularly if it is military. Accuracy is all. Surely it was the 31st Foot rather than the 38th and was the rifle yet in service and when did the Iron Duke say that it had been a really, really close-run thing? But Alan Mallinson's reputation rests on authenticity, for he is a serving soldier who has commanded a cavalry regiment. It is cavalry of the four-legged, rather than the tracked, sort that he has made his own in fiction and soon one has settled into regimental life, albeit in the early 19th century and, in this case, on the muddy river banks of Burma and the dusty plains of Hindoostan.