A.N. Wilson

Reading Dante is an experience of a lifetime. You never come to the end of it. But,  like Dante himself, at large in the frightening wood, you need a companion for the journey, and it is difficult to imagine one more enlightening than Prue Shaw. The Emeritus Reader in Italian at the University of London, she has been lighting up the genius of Dante for us all her professional life, especially his politics. But this book is just as accessible to a general reader as it would be a source of wonder and envy to scholars. It is mainly concerned with the Comedy, but it expounds much of Dante’s other work.

Oriel was only the fifth college to be founded in Oxford, in 1326. Although it has gone through periods of relative obscurity in the intervening seven centuries, it has also, at other times, been at the very centre of the intellectual life, not only of the university but of the nation. In the early 19th century, the Senior Common Room was dominated by the Noetics. These broad churchmen, who included Thomas Arnold, a fellow of the college before he became a famous head-master, believed in the acceptance of utilitarian economics, but also an application of Christian principles to society at large. Against them, and in the same common room, were the high churchmen or Tractarians, the most hypnotic of whom, John Henry Newman, was the closest Oxford ever got to possessing a guru.

This is the most sensible and systematic interpretation of George Orwell’s books that I have ever read. It generously acknowledges the true stature of the great works — most notably, Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. It rightly sees the second world war as having brought forth some of Orwell’s finest writing. Yet it does not deify him, and it acknowledges that this strange, drawling, gawky Etonian, who wore common sense like a carapace, was occasionally as capable as the next journalist of writing undiluted tosh. Witness his claim in an article of 1940 that if he thought a victory in the present war would mean a new lease of life for British imperialism, he would be inclined to ‘side with Russia and Germany’.

Nearly all the pages in this book are filled with thank-you letters. As a child, Elizabeth Bowes Lyon was writing to thank for presents of sweets and chocolates. As the Duke of York’s betrothed, she was writing ‘Dear Prince Bertie, Thank you ten million times for sending me all those gramophone records, which arrived in record time (oh! A joke, accident I promise).’ To Queen Mary, as a dutiful Duchess of York, she was writing  ‘Thank you very much for my delightful time at Balmoral’. As a widow, ‘My darling Lilibet, I did so love my week at Windsor, and send millions of thanks for so much sweetness & thought and care for your venerable parent.

This book deserves to be named in the same breath as those two great classics of royal biography, Roger Fulford’s Royal Dukes and James Pope-Hennessy’s Queen Mary. It shares with those two masterpieces the double advantage of being profoundly learned and a cracking good read. There is scarcely a paragraph of Bertie which does not contain new material, most of it culled from the Royal Archives, but also from a wide variety of other sources, including the diaries — which Jane Ridley discovered in the Royal College of Physicians — of Bertie’s German medic, Dr Sieveking. Its most affecting passages — and there are many — derive their power from the accumulation of carefully gathered detail.

Carla McKay’s The Folly of French Kissing (Gibson Square, £7.99) is a very funny, cynical tale about British expatriates in the Languedoc. The blurb says ‘Toujours Provence meets Miss Marple’, though the heroine, Judith Hay, is less maidenly than the nosy-parker of St Mary Mead. A middle-aged schoolmistress, she flees to the Languedoc because it is beautiful, because Montpellier has an English bookshop (called Wuthering Heights) and because the property is affordable: but also because she has a secret to put behind her. She’s been driven out of her job, teaching English at a well-known English boarding-school, because of an alleged affair with the headmistress.

A.N. Wilson recalls the worst decade of  recent history and the death throes of Old England There was a distressing news story the other day about a man who did not declare his father’s death because he wanted, like a character in Gogol, to go on claiming his late parent’s benefits. The smell eventually alerted neighbours to what was going on. The person I pitied was the pathologist who performed the autopsy, eventually declaring that the man had died of natural causes. Presumably this verdict could only be reached after hours of prodding putrescent limbs and organs with a scalpel. A similar feeling of pity arises when contemplating Dominic Sandbrook’s close scrutiny of Britain in the last five years of that terrible decade the 1970s.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School captures the hilarity and pathos of an eccentric headmaster and the unusual establishment he founded in Kensington in the Thirties. A.N.Wilson introduces us to his funny, peculiar world There are two sorts of school stories. Much the most popular, of course, are those that observe the drama of school life through the prism of the pupils’ imagination. Malory Towers, the Chalet School adventures, Jennings and Darbishire, Harry Potter, Billy Bunter all belong to this addictive genre.

Beryl Bainbridge’s last novel is a haunting echo of her own final years, according to A. N. Wilson Some writers die years before bodily demise. They lose their grip. In the last five or six years of life, Beryl Bainbridge feared that this was happening, or had happened, to her. The books which had come in a steady flow from middle age onwards slowed to a trickle, and she was seized, not merely by illness, but by a black sense that the ‘bloody book’ on which she was engaged would not come. Yet her last book, all but completed, suggests something odder was happening in her case. A prescient friend had a theory, during those years in which Bainbridge struggled to write The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress.

This is a strange exercise. It is a commonplace book of quotations from great authors, assembled by the philosopher A. C. Grayling. The extracts from the great books, how- ever, are provided without attribution. Furthermore, they are arranged in numbered ‘verses’, like the divisions of the ‘texts’ in the Bible. The Bible was thus divided for ease of reference when the Rabbis and the Christian Church — in separate exercises, obviously — decided which books should appear in the canon of Scripture. Why Grayling has numbered his collection of quotations is anyone’s guess. The title is slightly cringeworthy.