Victoria Glendinning

Adam Sisman begins his story of one of the most famous friendships in literary history with the vivid account of a young man who, having already walked 40 miles, takes a short-cut across a Dorset cornfield, running to greet two people working in their garden. The young man is Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the friends are William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. Over the ensuing six years the three were rarely parted for long. Their rambles together in the Quantocks are legendary.

When he was little, John McGahern’s mother took him with her to the school where she taught, through the lanes with flowering hedges linking the small reedy lakes of Co Leitrim, in the lee of the Iron Mountains. This physical and emotional geography is in his bones, and the source of ‘an extraordinary sense of security, of deep peace’. Over and over, in this memoir as in childhood, he goes up the cinder path to the little iron gate, past Brady’s house and pool and the house where the old Mahon brothers lived, past the dark, deep quarry and across the railway bridge and up the hill past Mahon’s shop. A similar litany-like repetition was a disconcerting feature of his novel For They Shall Face the Rising Sun.

Science is sexy. It always was, as we who were forced to give up biology at the age of 14, for the irrelevant reason that we were quite good at French, have always resentfully suspected. Now, accessible and even inaccessible books on how the physical world ticks become bestsellers. The new president-elect of the Royal Society gets quizzed on BBC 4’s PM programme, and Cheltenham and Edinburgh run festivals of science in addition to their celebrations of literature and music. These happenings no longer represent straws in the wind but great bales of the stuff, and this marvellous Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations is an ornament to the straw-stack.

A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen by Richard Jenkyns OUP, £12.99, pp. 200, ISBN 0199276617 ‘Each of us has a private Austen’ is the first line of Karen Joy Fowler’s readable and ingenious novel. This sentence, and her title, encapsulate her theme. The West Coast book club in question consists of five women, all steeped in the Austen oeuvre, and a single man with long eyelashes called Grigg who has never read any Jane Austen at all. Their ages range from the mid-sixties to the late twenties.

Martha Gellhorn, an American who lost faith in America, was one of the most important war-reporters of the 20th century. She was not interested in briefings from the top brass, though she sometimes used her blonde charm to get the top brass to fly her where she needed to go. What she did, in her own words, was to ‘bear witness’ to what war did to innocent people, especially children. She found her stories on the street and in the orphanages. Her style was pared-down and succinct, powered by outrage. She believed in the ultimate supremacy of goodness and justice until she went into Dachau. Then, seeing what she saw, she gave up hope. Caroline Moorehead makes Dachau the hinge and the determining event of her intelligent and sensitive biography.

THE ILLUSTRATED ZULEIKA DOBSONby Max Beerbohm, with an introduction by N. John HallYale, £9.99, pp. 432, ISBN 0300097328 Max Beerbohm wrote a tale called The Happy Hypocrite, a reversal of his friend Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. It's about a rake who puts on a saintly mask in order to win the love of a pure girl. When his mask is torn off, his former, dissolute face has become saintly underneath. The man has become his mask. One is reminded of this story while reading N. John Hall's Max Beerbohm: A Kind of a Life because readers of N. John Hall's previous work will find him revealed here in a completely new aspect. Which is the real N. John Hall? Happily and unhypocritically, the answer has to be: both. Professor N.