Philip Womack

I had a succession of brilliantly eccentric Classics teachers. Father Hunnwycke, a kindly and acerbic priest, showed his hatred of school inspections by holding up a German book called Group Sex in Ancient Rome every time the inspector’s dreary head was bowed. Another, a small, military Scottish man, would, after berating my misuse of the optative, launch into a diatribe about the evils of Tesco — or the Antichrist, as he preferred to think of it. He eventually ended up on Mount Athos. These wonderful people are a dying breed, says Harry Mount in this likeable, easygoing book. It is an odd creature — part memoir, part grammar book, part history, with a call to arms at the end for more rigorous teaching and more teachers.

Susanna Clarke taps enchantingly into a vein of folkloric gold. She presents our world as existing in tandem with ‘Faerie’, but without butterfly-winged Victoriana. Instead she creates a sense of danger, as if the Faeries in question are the displaced gods of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, still retaining elements of frightful power over mankind. Her debut novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, was hard to miss: it worked, like a charm. A story of the relationship between two master magicians in the early 19th century, it combined wit, vigour and elegance with a cracking good story.