Patrick Skene-Catling

There is none of the lugubriousness of Angela’s Ashes in this memoir of an Irish childhood in the dim days of old, before the advent of the Celtic Tiger, but Patricia Craig had her problems. In 1959, because of the ‘corrupting influence’ of her misbehaviour, the Dominican nuns expelled her at the age of 16 from their convent school in Belfast, and she was barred from other Catholic schools in the neighbourhood of the Falls Road. Now a respected literary critic, anthologist and broadcaster, Craig reminisces in unequivocal prose that expresses a sturdy and benign temperament. In retaliation back then in Ireland’s medieval era in the middle of the 20th century, she expelled Catholicism from her life. For her, apostasy was liberation.

Coward on the Beach by James Delingpole If you are not the right age to have enjoyed the thrills of serving in uniform in a really dangerous military campaign, the next best thing is to imagine one and write about it. That is what James Delingpole has done, very well indeed. His assiduous research, in the field, in the Imperial War Museum and elsewhere, his uncanny empathy with the officers and men of the 47th Royal Marine Commando, and his prose style, vigorous, witty and elegant, have produced a novel about the D-Day invasion of Normandy that’s a welcome corrective to the Spielberg–Hanks version and promises a lot more excitement to come. This novel is only Volume One of a projected ten-volume saga, which may well deserve the title A Dance to the Music of War.

John Walsh’s new novel is a paradoxically enjoyable account of the decline and fall of an Exeter College student of theology who becomes for a short time a performer in vaudeville and then an evangelist of Longford innocence and charity who believes he can perceive potential good in even the most depraved young women. Walsh frames this moral tale in the few known facts of the real life of the Reverend Harold Davidson (1875-1937), for a quarter of a century the rector of the country parish of Stiffkey and Morston in Norfolk, who spent most of every week in London in the 1920s and early 1930s, trying to save girls from poverty and prostitution.

No 007, the hero of Richard Powers’ suspenseful new novel is a cognitive neurologist. The young man who urgently needs help is a mechanic in an abattoir in a small town in Nebraska. It is a welcome relief to read fiction so interestingly unpredictable, humane and educative. Instead of the consumerism, sex and violence of commonplace contemporary entertainment, the drama of The Echo Maker resides in the problem of how to integrate parts of a brain that have accidentally ceased to communicate with each other. Powers makes no concessions to lay readers, but manages to make the significance of psychopharmacological name-dropping perfectly clear in its context.

That beautiful, untamed brunette (or was she a woman in Zee & Co.?) was once more fervid than Elizabeth Taylor in party mood. Edna O’Brien at the age of 73, however, is a circumspect Titian, with a porcelain complexion and minimal maquillage. The rebellious country girl, who ran away from a village in County Clare, has been for many years a ladylike resident of London. Or so she appears. One should not judge novelists by their appearance, perhaps, but her presence in her writing is so relentlessly pervasive that it is impossible not to notice the altered superficialities and wonder how she has changed inside. She hasn’t. Readers who loved her anti-authoritarian previous books are sure to love this one too.

Following the success of his first memoir, The Speckled People, Hugo Hamilton has written a second one, with the balanced shapeliness and emotional intensity of a very good novel. The Sailor in the Wardrobe is the story of his rite of passage from restricted late boyhood in Dublin to independent young manhood adrift abroad. The sailor of the enigmatic title was his paternal grandfather, who ran away from Ireland to join the Royal Navy and was killed at sea. His portrait in uniform was kept in the family wardrobe, a symbol of the confinement from which Hugo also yearned to escape. Hugo’s mother was a conciliatory German with Allied military government denazification credentials who migrated to Ireland after the second world war.

When publishers keep a children’s book in print for a certain number of years it is called a classic, by the publishers themselves, of course, then by teachers and librarians, and sometimes by men and women who knew the book when they were young. Nicholas, by every criterion, from every point of view, has attained classical status, and is a much-needed reminder of the Entente Cordiale.

Having obsessively admired Billie Holiday’s singing for 50 years or so, having seen her perform whenever possible, having listened to her recordings again and again, and having read hundreds of thousands of words about her, I received Julia Blackburn’s With Billie in a mood of blasé scepticism. It is a pleasure to report that this is a really marvellous book, the most uninhibitedly intimate portrayal ever of the short, hard life and overall musical triumph of Lady Day. Though not as orderly as Stuart Nicholson’s 1995 biography, for example, With Billie more vividly reflects the chaos that Billie Holiday was born into and only rarely escaped from.

Which of the acts of courage does the title mean? In the Peninsular War, there were so many it’s hard to choose. In the seventh volume of the Matthew Hervey saga (a novel well able to stand alone), Allan Mallinson’s protagonist is a hero among heroes, when the cavalry was the cavalry and his regiment, the 6th Light Dragoons, Princess Caroline’s Own, seems in retrospect to have been an order of chivalry. Young Matthew, son of a country parson, was recently ‘an ink-fingered boy at Shrewsbury School’. Now he is a cornet, the most junior cavalry officer, in Wellington’s army. He is already a veteran of the famous retreat to Corunna, where the regiment had to destroy all its horses before sailing back to England.

The 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers were terrific disaster television. No special effects! How about those great shots of real people jumping off to avoid incineration? And here comes the novel, which can be read as the preview of a dramatic treatment for the script of the movie. A novel is only second best to reality TV, of course, but there are certain advantages. Frédéric Beigbeder, a 39-year-old Parisian publisher, literary critic and broadcaster, has been able imaginatively to penetrate places where there were no cameras on that day.

Tom Hodgkinson is a 21st-century Luddite. He wishes we could smash the principles of capitalist consumerism that enslave most of the population so they can service their debts. In this beguiling book, he persuasively advocates idleness as the way to gain access to the creativity of the subconscious mind, or at least to enjoy a few beers. Hodgkinson is a dedicated connoisseur of idleness. He is the founder and editor of Idler magazine, which enables him to support himself and his family in Devon. Endorsed by quotations from an interestingly variegated team of believers in the benefits of inactivity, including Dr Johnson, William Blake, Bertrand Russell, G.K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, Karl Marx’s son-in-law and Jeffrey Bernard, Hodgkinson now summarises his tranquil philosophy.

Irishness is perceptible almost everywhere, if you look with eyes half closed, especially in China, Israel and the Latin Countries of the Mediterranean. Irishness traditionally means, above all, a strong sense of family and its web of interconnections, to furthest cousinhood and tribalism. However, there is not much Irishness in northern Europe, except for the pseudo-Irish pubs, and there is a lot less than there used to be in Ireland itself before the Celtic Tiger’s beguiling introduction of materialistic conformity, and the thraldom of early marriage, easy mortgages and credit consumerism. In the era of television homogenisation, Irish eccentricity no longer flourishes as it did, but is still sentimentally memorialised now and then by those no longer young.

Private collections of miscellaneous oddities, valuable works of art and all sorts of objects, animal, vegetable and mineral, of little if any apparent intrinsic value, are collectors' emblems of the world in miniature, microcosmic claims to the whole macrocosm. This splendid book, elegantly analytical and lavishly illustrated, makes the collectors' obsession understandable to the point of envy. How convenient it would be if all possible books could be comprehended in that hypothetical single Borgesian volume, and how gratifying it would be to own it. The truly dedicated proprietors of cabinets of curiosities seemed to aspire to nothing less, as Patrick MauriŒs demonstrates with fond sympathy.

'Yes,' writes the eponymous narrator of this exceptionally clever, vivacious account of sibling rivalry, 'there are many wax dolls on the shelves of my memory and I make sure I still twist the pins now and again, in passing.' The dolls most vindictively pierced are those representing her twin sister and her mother. There are intimations of grandfatherly child abuse and a hint of Electra complex. The family's exotic and rancorous family history is recorded, not altogether veritably, on her laptop by Cassandra at the age of 39, a cosmopolitan, embittered Englishwoman dying of cancer in a mental asylum on Ithaca. Sounds a bit grim? Strangely, it isn't.

'What a swankpot!' Sir Norman Wisdom pseudo-modestly pseudo-rebukes himself after listing some of the trophies in a display cabinet at home on the Isle of Man. 'But why not?' he asks, almost disarmingly. 'I did get 'em, didn't I?' This is ventriloquial star-speak by William Hall, an expert writer-with, whose credits include biographies of Michael Caine, James Dean, Frankie Howerd, Larry Adler and Dick Emery. Wisdom's cabinet contains a British Academy Award, seven trophies for Britain's Top Comedian, seven engraved silver spoons from John Paddy Carstairs, one for each Norman Wisdom film he directed, emblems of the Golden Flame from Argentina and the Lifetime Achievement Award from his fellow British comics. Is Little Norm proud? Cor, not 'arf!