Culture

Like most human beings, most novelists are neither outstandingly good nor outstandingly bad. This poses a problem for reviewers. A good novelist can write interestingly about mediocre characters; but even a superlative reviewer may find it difficult to write interestingly about mediocre novels. In consequence, reviewers all too often rush to the extremes of proclaiming a novel either a stinker or a masterpiece. In my own time, reviewers have called Anthony Powell the English Proust and C. P. Snow the English Balzac, and compared Olivia Manning's two wartime trilogies to War and Peace. When, some 50 years ago, I published a novel entitled The Widow, my publisher rang up in a state of rare excitement to tell me that a now forgotten reviewer had referred to me as 'Gibbon's successor'.

In 1845 Newman was received into the Roman Catholic Church. More than a century and a half later, the fires of controversy ignited by the Oxford Movement which he led, as an Anglican priest, until his reception, seem to have died down. Newman himself is widely regarded as a great Christian apologist and a sympathetic and good man. Above all, the story of Newman is a popular and moving tale. English Roman Catholics are proud of his fame. Many Anglicans are happy to accept his sacramental legacy, if not the disciplines that go with it. Conservatives admire his stand against liberalism and liberals enjoy using and abusing his doctrine of development.

From the time I was a little girl, long before I knew I wanted to be a writer, I had three ambitions which I felt that I must achieve in order fully to realise my potential as an adult. And they were: to take drugs, to sleep with Jews and to be notorious. In short, I wanted to be a bohemian, even though I had never heard the word. Well, I certainly did what I set out to do, but by the age of 35 the idea of the bohemian life held a beat too long fair turned my stomach, and I embraced Hove, the Church of England and strict monogamy - surely the terminal trio of anti-bohoism - with a fervour which I retain today; for while to be a young bohemian is both soulful and sexy, to be an old bohemian is very sad indeed.

According to Ward McAllister, the fabled gate-keeper of New York high society in the 1890s, to be counted among the privileged few you needed poise, an aptitude for polite conversation, a polished and deferential manner, an infinite capacity of good humour, and the ability to entertain and be entertained. And also, by the by, pots of money. Given that one was expected to change one's entire outfit nine times a day and take 20 gowns just for summer hols, the cost of belonging could have floated a small country, let alone a young lady. Yet the need to be part of an icily exclusive set with a profound sense of position was so desperate that women tormented themselves into obedience to shared rituals of numbing idiocy which must surely have smothered their humanity.