Philip Hensher

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.