Philip Hensher

Robert Browning, in life, was always immensely popular in a worldly way; he knew everyone not just in London but in Europe, and was almost universally loved over the dinner table. More than that, his shining, decent, boldly original mind leaps out from any biography, and it is easy to see how enchanting and charming he must have been in person. His poetry, on the other hand, is another matter; it has never been exactly popular. Even at the height of his success in 1870, just after the publication and immense acclamation of The Ring and the Book, he earned only £100 from his poetry, and his busy social life had to be funded by a legacy from a rich benefactor.

The spy novel is an essential literary genre of our present imagination. Like other popular forms at different times, it seems to sum up more of our anxieties than it quite admits. The ghost story in Edwardian England was popular because it focussed a strain of passionate morbidity; the detective story is essentially a 1930s genre, entertainment for a time in search of solutions. Spy novels continue their obsessive grip on our imagination, even after the end of the Cold War, because they demonstrate, like a formal dance, some of the most haunting philosophies of indeterminacy and mutually shifting positions.

One has to ask the question: is this, intrinsically, an interesting subject? Personally, I would say not. Homosexual-ity, fairly clearly, is a genetic or innate human variation, comparable to left-handedness and probably occurring, like left-handedness, in about 5-10 per cent of humanity. That is, rationally speaking, about the limit of its intellectual interest: and who on earth, even left-handed people, would read a history of left-handedness? Of course, for various other reasons, homosexuality does acquire a sort of social history, because it was rarely allowed to rest as simply a biological variation, but was turned into a sin, a disease or a crime by society at large.

This is an exceptional biography, which is just as well, since I don’t think one could bear to have the heartbreaking story it tells recounted carelessly. John Clare is one of the great Romantic poets, but his history and origins have always meant that he was either treated with neglect or used by his admirers for their own ends. This unusually tactful and sympathetic book tries, for once, not to claim Clare for any particular cause, but to see what he was trying to do in his own terms. Clare came from the poorest of the agricultural classes, and indeed continued working as a labourer even when he had attained some literary celebrity.

There are two literary facts in English which it is almost impossible to examine, to see clearly. They are Shakespeare and the King James Bible. In both cases, the impossibility derives from the same point; that critical standards of what great English writing means stem so completely from Shakespeare's peculiar virtues and from the values of the prose in the King James Bible that all commentators and, indeed, all English-speakers subsequently have lived within their limits, and have been unable to step outside and discuss their subjects with any clarity, as one can step outside Spenser or Wordsworth, and see their world whole and distant, with an awareness of alternative models of excellence.

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.

I have to register a strong complaint about the misleading and opportunistic title of this book; it is not about 'the Great Game' as the phrase is usually understood. Various interesting and valuable attempts, such as the studies by Peter Hopkirk, have made the case that the British/Russian rivalry for control over Central Asia not only continued into the Soviet era, but is plausibly still going on. But no one will expect a book with this title to be about 20th-century Iran. Nor is it as general as the title implies; I would love to read a dashing book which deserves this title. There are excellent English books on Persia and the Great Game, pre-eminently M. E. Yapp's brilliant Strategies of British India, but they are all a bit magisterial.

Shena Mackay has had a difficult and unconventional career, and it has taken a long time for most readers to register what a powerful and original novelist she is. Several things have counted, unfairly, against her; her subjects are not just domestic, but often suburban, which she presents with a disconcerting rapture. She does not write long books, nor polemical ones; it is hard to say what any given novel by her is 'about', although various fiercely held convictions may, from time to time, be discerned. They are primarily about human beings living their lives, rendered with increasing mastery and a hard-won truth; and there is nothing harder in the world to defend than that.

Superficially, Hitler and Churchill resembled each other, in the way that two very powerful leaders will. In particular, as Andrew Roberts points out, both their careers rested on a particular sort of confidence trick, an ability to misrepresent the facts of the case and thereby inspire their followers into action. In Hitler's case it was the malign lie that Germany's difficulties after the Great War, and indeed the fact that they lost that war, were down to the machinations of international Jewry. In Churchill's case, it was the benign and necessary claim that victory could be achieved by the British will alone; a claim which, throughout the country's 'finest hour' of 1940-1, was in reality extremely dubious.

This is a strange, tantalising book of unintentional poetry; it is rather like a book plucked from the shelves of one of Jorge Luis Borges' impossible libraries. The first book of the celebrated philanthropist, collector and Daimler heir, Gert-Rudolf 'Muck' Flick, it is a highly scholarly and lucid biography of a dozen or so great paintings; a biography so far as it is known, since this is the story of the provenance and history of paintings now thought to be lost. None of them is definitely destroyed; another book could be written about such works, like 'The Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn', which many of Hogarth's contemporaries thought his greatest painting, which now is only known through a stunning engraving.

Wodehouse, all in all, is lasting astonishingly well. His world is dated, but then it was always dated; it is basically Edwardian, and went on, barely changed, into the 1960s and 1970s. But his appeal is not the period charm of a Diary of a Nobody or a Saki; it is much more alive than that. By now we should probably start suspecting that he will prove one of the great novelists. Apart from England, I think the only country in the world which truly loves and understands Wodehouse is India. It seems bizarre, but there's something illuminating in that. Indian English is passionately in love with English grammar at its most formal; in the commuter trains of Bombay, the subjunctive and the gerund still thrive in ordinary speech.

Long long ago, they used to say that the difference between the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs was this. In Berlin, the situation was always serious, but not hopeless. In Vienna, on the other hand, the situation was invariably hopeless, but not serious. It should never be forgotten that Billy Wilder, that most adorable of film directors, was in origin, and at heart always remained, Viennese. That is the case, despite his long and wonderful career in America, and despite the fact that what, for me, is his best film, One, Two, Three, is a Berlin movie. The subject of the ZmigrZs from Germany and Austria to Hollywood is a fascinating one, and has inspired what ought to be a classic book, Salka Viertel's The Kindness of Strangers.

£14.99 for individual volumes The single problem facing any translator of Proust is that there is, really, no equivalent of his style in English. He is at once classical and idiosyncratic; the rhythms and proportions of classical French style are followed faithfully in every sentence, and over the whole book. The end result looks so alarmingly new, however, because the proportions and rhythms are employed on an unprecedented scale. The novel really is one novel, and not, like Anthony Powell, a sequence of novels; his sentences are always immense, balanced epigrams. The novel has an essential orthodox classicism which emerges, on such a scale, as revolutionary audacity.