Culture

This vast work has the distinction of being both unreadable and unputdownable. It consists of nearly half a million words, a mountain of unsifted facts - who was whose cousin and what otherwise irrelevant uncle died in South Africa - which make you clutch your brow, tempt you to skip and thereby to run the risk of missing something revealing, amusing, germane. Perhaps these bits should have been printed in different type. Not a mountain, perhaps, a quarry for future Yeats scholars. However, these - a last complaint - will not be helped by the index: under 'astrology', for example, there are no less than 150 page references but no indication at all what occasion, or aspect of astrology, the pages mention; as an index, therefore, it is useless.

Even Churchill might have been discouraged had he, instead of Lord Portland, been prime minister and surveying the scene in 1807. Bonaparte had crushed the Prussians, knocked out the Austrians, and forced Russia to sue for peace. He had organised an almost total blockade of the continent against British trade, was redrawing the map of central and eastern Europe to consolidate his position, and had placed his family on thrones from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. Britain's only allies were Sweden and Naples, and even Naples was in French hands except for Sicily, whence the king had fled.

In 1743, 393 livings within the gift of the Archbishop of York were occupied by clergymen who did not live within that diocese and another 335 incumbents held plural livings. One bishop of Winchester distributed 30 incumbencies among his family. The Church of England was corrupt and slumbered. The facts of John Wesley's life and of his 'Great Awakening' which disturbed the slumbers are clear. Born in 1703, he was ordained and died a priest in the Church of England.

KEANE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHYby Roy KeanePenguin/Michael Joseph, £17.99, pp. 294, ISBN 07181455 One could imagine an American visitor to Hatchards being mildly puzzled by a joint biography of the Kennedys which sports a picture of two duelling footballers on its cover, but no, Jack and Bobby turns out to be a chronicle of the Charlton brothers. As such it recapitulates, and to a limited degree extends, a saga that sports journalists have been amusing themselves with for nearly 40 years, certainly long before the celebrated joint appearance in the 1966 World Cup final. On the surface - a surface diligently polished by the sports writers and professional colleagues - the story of the Charltons is one of diametrical opposites.

Two years ago in The Spectator I praised Ha Jin's earlier novel, Waiting. It was about a kindly, ineffectual army doctor who waits and waits for a divorce from his peasant wife so that he can marry a nurse, his lover without sex for 13 years. Ha, who teaches English at Boston University after learning it by listening to the World Service, came to the US in 1985 when he was 29. Waiting won the National Book Award. One of the reasons I liked that book was Ha's creation of a world in which people acted naturally, like real Chinese, as their gripping story unfolded. The problem with The Crazed is that the same Chinese habits are there, right down to smells, noises and stains, but the story, such as it is, plods.

This queer, black novel is mainly concerned with the special funeral train service which once plied between Waterloo Station and Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Its hero is an intensely innocent young railway apprentice, who dreams of becoming an engine driver 'of the better sort', and its villains - or so it seems - are a bunch of hard-bitten, foul-mouthed colleagues who are apparently up to something dark and dirty. Set during the closing months of 1903, this book is, as its publishers rightly claim, 'fabulously rich in atmosphere and period detail', but this backdrop material is so skilfully woven into the story that it comes across as playfully invented rather than laboriously researched.