Recently Read Novels

I heard an interview with Gervaise Finn the other day. Finn is the former teacher and schools inspector who writes cosily humorous anecdotes about his work in the Yorkshire Dales. It’s like All Creatures Great and Small, with kids instead of cows.

In the interview, where Finn was discussing some of his favourite books, he made the point that he tended to read as a writer. He would be aware of the technical devices, the style adopted, the choice of words, the pacing, etc.

I’m no writer, but I find myself doing the same thing. It reminds me of how, many years ago, when reading for a literary degree, I would write ‘literary appreciations’ as an academic exercise, usually on a piece of verse – Subject, Theme, Content, Style was the usual framework. It was all a bit dry. I sometimes think that a poem demands an emotional response and, if you are able to do a good job of conveying that response in writing, there is little point in the poem in the first place.

That’s not entirely true, obviously. After all, a good artist needs a sound knowledge of anatomy. But it irritates me when all a critic can do is point out allusions, interesting rhyme schemes and the like. It’s rather like watching O, Brother, Where Art Thou? with someone who insists on telling you all the parallels with The Odyssey. (That someone, by the way, could easily be me, I have to confess).

I was moved to muse on these matters because I’ve just completed several very different books.

Augustus, by John Williams, a novel which I’ve mentioned before, is the story of the first Emperor of Rome told by means of letters, diary entries, military reports, official proclamations, etc. Thus it provides a multiplicity of points of view, similar to the letter-novels of the novel’s infancy. It does not attempt therefore to pronounce an overall objective judgment on the central character. Such a judgment would merely be that of the author in any case and the multi-viewpoint approach offers greater truth if less certainty.

The Killer Within Me by Jim Thompson is also written in the first person, that person being criminally insane. While Williams' style is impressionistic, Thompson’s, typically of that American genre of ‘roman noir’, is expressionistic. It’s direct, crude and slangy. Sentences are short and punctuation is peppered with dashes, ellipses, capitalisation. Lot’s of dialogue.

Raymond Chandler always praised Jim Thompson as the master. So did Stanley Kubrick, for whom he wrote the screenplays of The Killing and Paths of Glory. Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway was based on a Thompson novel.

It is the custom to say that a movie is not as good as the novel upon which it is based. Not always true, by any means. The Guns of Navarone, for example, which I have just re-read. I know the film well, having seen it at an impressionable age – I still write my ‘e’s’ in the pseudo-Greek way (rather like this: <- ) used in the credits. Alastair MacLean obviously strives to write well, trying hard to describe and depict the storms, the scenery and even a little psychology. But he’s constrained by his formula. Every member of the team is an expert, able to demonstrate superhuman skills and perform uncommon feats of endurance. MacLean’s attempts at ‘literature’, if anything slow the book down, unlike the film, which never lets up the pace in all its two-plus hours. The film also redrew the characters, partly to flesh them out and tailor them to the all-star cast. It also created extra dimensions to provide more internal tension. And a couple of women to add a little sexual interest. A book of MacLean’s that I plan to read is what I think was his first, HMS Ulysses, which some consider to be one of the best books on the naval theatre of World War II, along with The Cruel Sea and The Caine Mutiny.

In the meantime I’m reading The Good Shepherd by C S Forester, whose books I’ve loved since I discovered Hornblower in my teens. Forester also wrote The African Queen, The Gun (which became The Pride and the Passion – now that was one where the film didn’t do justice to the book - and Brown on Resolution, which became Single-handed or Sailor of the King or Born for Glory or Forever England, take your pick. Take your pick of endings too.

The Good Shepherd is the story of a day in the life of the commander of a convoy escort at the height of the War in the Atlantic. In minute, methodical detail we follow the cat-and-mouse struggle between a destroyer and a wolf-pack of U-boats.

A brave book in many ways, for many would find it boring, despite the tension, for it is repetitive and action is minimal. I’m finding it fascinating.

A range of authors, a range of styles. Good or bad I admire them all, because writing is difficult. I know, I try to do it everyday, and am conscious of my inability to measure up to my own expectations, let alone the quality I see in others.

I’ve tried to compose poems and songs; I’ve attempted humour, irony and polemic in essays and letters; I keep a diary, I write my blog and snatches of autobiography; I’ve turned my hand to fiction, short stories worthy of women’s magazines and some fit only for the top shelf. But.

But I miss out on the elegance and insight of John Williams, the unself-consciousness of Thompson, the plotting and personal experience of MacLean, the knowledge of Forester, the warmth of Finn – not to mention other favourite authors. Wilde’s wit, Alastair Cooke’s conversational and discursive style – the list is endless. And intimidating.

But, as Churchill would say – he’s another one – KBO.

Augustus (1972) by John Williams

My Google alert for ‘sonnet’ referred me to an article on John Williams, an American novelist of whom I had not previously heard.

He died in 1994, having completed a small body of work, novels that appear to be very different one from the other, at least superficially.

One of these was Augustus (1972), an epistolary-type novel about the first Roman emperor. The man is described by his contemporaries, friends, enemies and observers, in letters, diaries and official documents. It is technically accomplished, elegant in style and penetrating in its psychology, which cannot avoid being ‘modern’ and all the more interesting for that.

Augustus finally speaks for himself, as an old man, in a long last chapter, from which this excerpt particularly struck me today:

‘The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey through strange seas and unknown islands, where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby discover his immortality.

The man of middle years, who has lived the future that he once dreamed, sees life as a tragedy; for he has learned that his power, however great will not prevail against those forces of accident and nature to which he gives the names of gods, and has learned that he is mortal.

But the man of age, if he plays his assigned role properly, must see life as a comedy. For his triumphs and his failures merge, and one is no more the occasion for pride or shame than the other; and he is neither the hero who proves himself against those forces, nor the protagonist who is destroyed by them. Like any poor, pitiable shell of an actor, he comes to see that he has played so many parts that there no longer is himself.’

Thomas Hardy

Well, I've learned how to get more hits on this blog. Just mention Ewa Sonnet. Haha, got you again.

Because I want to talk about books.

Yesterday I began reading Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. I read the first chapter on the bus and wondered why I had enjoyed it so much, and why it wasn't just pleasure the book was giving me.

It was also relief. And what relief to begin an old-fashioned, well-written novel. The long, rolling sentences, interwoven with spare, fresh dialogue. Lots of interesting characters, just the right side of exaggeration, described with understanding and a touch of humour.

For example, I love this little description of Bathsheba’s companion, Liddy:

‘Liddy, like a little brook, though shallow, was always rippling; her presence had not so much weight as to tax thought, and yet enough to exercise it.’


Nineteenth century novelists weren’t afraid of complicated stories, coincidence, long words, classical allusions, elegant style, narative omniscience and authorial comment.

I love it.

What a contrast with what I’ve been reading. OK, Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote was well-written, entertaining and thoughtful, but ultimately a dramatised debate about different kinds of faith, religious and political. Therefore, rather irrelevant and slight.

Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale was laboured and derivative. There was the one whose title I’ve forgotten about the old girl who’s released from a mental home after 60 years into the care of a niece and the relationship which develops. I enjoyed it at the time but in retrospect it was just a two-hander, rather like a TV play in comparison with a movie. And after a while, a novel written in the present tense becomes a bit wearing.

So does the first person. I’ve said before that authors like Chandler and Wodehouse pulled off the first person novel expertly. Nick Hornby isn’t bad, but the characters he creates to tell the story are ultimately a bit boring. And so often the technique seems merely an excuse for poor writing and lack of intelligence. Why doesn’t the author adopt a persona who knows how to string a sentence together and has a broader vocabulary than four-letter words?

Ted Lewis (Jack’s Return Home) for example; Trainspotting; The Pornographer Diaries. I call it ‘scrotelit’.

In the same vein is The Damned United, by David Peace. It’s the story of Brian Clough’s brief and disastrous stint as manager of Leeds United, a club he had always hated. Inasmuch as it tries to get into his mind as he faces each day there and contrasts it with the joy he had previously found as manager of Derby, it is fascinating.

But. But it is written in a pseudo-poetical style, the main technique being repetition. Repetition. Repetition. After a while, it gets boring, boring. Boring. And so, so, so irritating. It really got on my nerves. Got on my nerves.

So, back to Thomas Hardy, where ‘The scarlet and the orange light outside the malthouse did not penetrate to its interior, which was, as usual, lighted by a rival glow of similar hue, radiating from the hearth.’

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

You'll find a synopsis of this novel

here. (I still can't get the hang of this linking business).

Setterfield's novel aims to be 'gothic'. It has all the elements - crumbling mansions, violence, incest, ghosts and a cast of characters who are feral, sick, psychologically damaged and plain mad.

Its time-setting is vaguely contemporary and the story takes place mainly on the Yorhire moors (where else?) and some sort of Mummerset around Banbury.

It tries very hard, but it doesn't work. Perhaps it's just too difficult to take this sort of tale out of its natural location in the early nineteenth century.

To her credit, Setterfield makes clear her debt to Jane Eyre in particular, and here is her main problem. Jane Eyre is not a gothic novel, mad wife in the attic notwithstanding. Its characters, for all their melodramatic characteristics, are real and we care about them. Setterfield's gallery of grotesques are as two-dimensional as the characters on a Cluedo board.

Mystery. There's plenty of mystery in this book. And if you like convolutions for their own sake, then you'll enjoy it. For my own part, the final revelations produced a sigh of 'So what?'

Mma Ramotswe

I see BBC Radio is broadcasting dramatisations of Alexander McCall Smith's Mma Ramotswe stories. This one can be heard again for a week.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/afternoon_play.shtml

Rra Bolingbroke writes

I'm onto my third Mma Ramotswe book, Morality for Beautiful Girls. I suppose there are people out there who don't know how good these novels are. I'm in danger of boring people to death singing their praises, which, I suppose, they find a refreshing change from all the other things I bore them about.

Since I've always considered myself a bit of an existentialist - I say 'a bit' because I've never quite been able to understand what Monsieur Sartre was talking about - I was interested in Mma Ramotswe's take on the subject.

She was musing on morality and deploring the modern inclination towards individualism, which led people to devise their own personal code, which of course just means selfishness.

She was particularly perplexed by these 'existentialists', who live in France and feel the need to be 'real'. Therefore the real thing to do is the right thing to do. She realises that she has met many existentialists in her life without knowing they were such. Her former husband, for example, who beat her and had other women, (obviously existentialist women). It is a good life, she thinks, being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, non-existentialist, people around one.

Mma's faith is in the morality of her forefathers and the 10 commandments. But what are we to do, who have no god and whose forefathers kept changing their minds?

Mind you, she got Sartre's character right, the old hypocritical goat.

Gift Books for Teenage Boys (but not exclusively)

I have just started the second volume of A M Smith's Mma Ramotswe's saga.

This man is bloody brilliant. Read it, read them all.

It made me think of what books I'd recommend to teenagers, especially my own. I'll list them. Now, I'm assuming a certain amount of willingness, a certain amount of intelligence. And my list will probably be more acceptable to boys. What I want are novels that will be enjoyed, but are nonetheless well written, let's say a bit classy. For what it's worth, here it is:

1. Brighton Rock by Grahame Greene. Catholic guilt by the seaside. Greene was full of shit, to be honest, but if you're a juvenile starting to think about meaning, but still like a few razor murders, this is your book.

2. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Jaundiced rewrite of Coral Island. We are all 'born in sin and conceived in iniquity'. Can't argue with that. Compare with The Wild Bunch.

3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Beautiful child's-eye view of the liberal lawyer in the racist Deep South defending a black man on a charge of rape - what else? Spawned the film, that gained Gregory Peck an Oscar, the accolade of America's favourite cinema hero and inspired a million Americans to study law.

4. Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger. Has to be on the list, doesn't it? Self-indulgent, alienated teenage crap. They'll love it.

5. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. 'Them as dies'll be the lucky ones. Haha, Jim lad' - or is that the film. Give them the video at the same time.

6. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. If they like this, who knows, they might move on to Great Expectations. I choose this because it's short and seasonal. It probably invented Christmas as we know it. By the way, don't tell them it's written in verse.

7. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Or, Farewell, My Lovely. Or, best of all, The Long Goodbye. Chandler's plots are incomprehensible and you never remember the ending, which means you can read them over and over and just enjoy the style. I think even Jane Austen would have smiled secretly at the line, 'She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.'

8. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I wasn't going to put this in, but why not? She's readable, she's witty, she's ironic, she's stylish, she's great. She's also bloody frightening.

9. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas. Short stories, vaguely autobiographical, and it doesn't come much better. When a great poet relaxes, the prose just flows. After this, get them to listen to Under Milk Wood, and, who knows, they might even think Fern Hill is a bit special.

10. The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. As long as they don't expect a convoluted mystery or blood and guts, they might like this wonderfully observed depiction of a gentle, mature African lady, making her way as a PI amongst the easy-going traditions of Botswana. My latest enthusiasm.

11. Harry's Game by Gerald Seymour. British agent infiltrates Republican Belfast. Spare, simple, tragic. Seymour wrote lots more books, longer and more detailed, always well-researched, but this one is clean and sharp. And nerve-wracking.

12. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre. Le Carre has tended to be a bit preachy recently, but he is a very good novelist, for all that he is a genre writer, so-called. Tinker, Tailor . . .is wonderful and A Perfect Spy is a genuine masterpiece. Start with The Spy . . .and you'll be hooked.

13. Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard. This is the one Tarantino's Jackie Brown was based on. I think of Elmore Leonard as being superior pulp fiction (appropriately). As is -

14. Jim Thompson. If you can get it I recommend The Getaway.

15. Right Ho, Jeeves! by P G Wodehouse. I fear that the upper-class twenties ambiance of the Wooster stories might be off-putting to today's teenager. And Wooster's slang could come across as just plain silly. Nevertheless, the intelligent teenager deserves the chance to read these beautifully crafted, intensely funny stories. I have heard it argued that Jeeves and Wooster are a comic version of Holmes and Watson. Which brings me on to -

16. A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle. The first Holmes story and the first long story (It's hardly a novel). I recommend this rather than The Hound of the Baskervilles because there's too little Holmes in the latter, although it has the moors and the hound. Then there are the sets of short stories. I've always thought the best is Silver Blaze, which does not involve the all too frequent exotic creatures, Australian secret societies and hopelessly incompetent 'Napoleons of crime'.

17. Shane or Monte Walsh by Jack Schaefer. Along Oakley Hall's Warlock and Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, these are two of the few novels set in the Old West which have literary pretensions and are also enjoyable and informative.

18. Riotous Assembly or Indecent Exposure by Tom Sharpe. Depending on your taste, Sharpe is either outrageously offensive or hilariously funny. Either way, a good choice. These two books are savage satires on South Africa's apartheid regime. Sharpe got himself deported.

19, 20. More comedy: Peter Tinniswood (I didn't know you cared) and David Nobbs (The Fall and Rise of Reggie Perrin). Both intelligent, affectionate and funny. And how they love the English language.

21. The Onion Field by Joseph Wambaugh. Not a novel, but written with the verve that Wambaugh brings to his fiction. It's the story of a robbery that goes wrong and its effects on the cops and criminals involved in the torturous legal process which follows.

22. C S Forester is still worth reading. His Hornblower novels, especially A Ship of the Line, are preferable Patrick O'Brian's Napoleonic Wars naval stories, because they carry their expert knowledge more lightly. I always feel I'm being lectured in the architecture of sailing ships by O'Brian. Of course, that might appeal to the more nerdish.

23. The War of the Worlds by H G Wells. I know nothing of modern SF and choose this because it was written before the advent of the genre and the cult and is therefore more human.

24. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Steinbeck's reputation is lower than when he won the Nobel Prize, but this remains a modern classic. An angry book, that never gives up on human nature, it transcends its left-wing bias.

25. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. A nice short introduction to the great man.

The Lady from Botswana

I finished The Number One Ladies Detective Agency yesterday and immediately reserved the sequel, Tears of the Giraffe, from the library.

Number One is a remarkable book. More a series of short stories and impressionistic interludes, loosely strung together, than the kind of 'detective novel' you might expect from Christie, Chandler or Highsmith.

The central character is Mma Ramotswe, Mma being a polite form of address to a lady of marriageable years (the masculine equivalent is Rra). Following the death of her father, she sells her large bovine inheritance and sets up as a private detective, the first and only in Botswana. Various cases follow but they only serve to illustrate the perspicacity and humanity of our heroine, who loves to sit and talk about her beloved country, its progress, its traditions and its weaknesses, mainly caused by men, so chauvinist, so unfaithful, so venal.

Botswana is made to seem like an easy-going place, democratic (with a little harmless corruption) and enlightened (apart from a little backwoods witchcraft). It's got a touch of To Kill a Mockingbird about it. I'm not sure why that popped into my head, but I'll leave it in here and trust to my instincts.

The author, Alexander McCall Smith, now a professor in Scotland, I believe, lived in and obviously loves Africa. His depiction of Botswana is gentle, humorous and indulgent. His style is simple and elegant, intelligent, wise and wry. I recommend him.

The Hitman Diaries

I've just finished Danny King's The Hitman Diaries (click on my title for link)

A professional killer kills a lot of people while looking for love, of a sort.

What can I say? I wasn't laughing out loud all the time, as I'd been promised, but the piling up of unwanted corpses near the beginning of the story is genuinely comic.

I wasn't shocked by the casual attitude to violence. I was watching spaghetti Westerns in the sixties. And Get Carter. And The Killers, with Lee Marvin (highly recommended).

I wasn't impressed by the attempt at depth by reproducing the imaginary dialogues our psychopath hero has with his dead mother and the odd victim.

Interesting idea that the ideal woman for him is one who is so ill or injured that she needs constant selfless care. Is Mr King a Catholic?

He's no Jane Austen or Irvine Welsh, but I've already reserved The Bank Robber's Diaries from the library.

Serendipity

One of the joys of the internet is serendipity.

For example, following a conversation in which my daughter confessed to complete ignorance of Alastair Cooke, I found transcripts of many of his Letter from America on the BBC website, most with an audio facility. I e-mailed her one or two and took the opportunity to listen to many of them myself.

In one of them Mr Cooke paid tribute to a recently deceased New York Jewish writer, who wrote novels about the wheeling and dealing of a first generation immigrant rogue in the garment district of the Lower East Side. Cooke lamented that the reaction of most people, on hearing his name, Jerome Weidman, would be to say, 'Who?' That, indeed, was mine.

But of course, all I have to do is switch over to the county library website, check their catalogue and, if the object of my search is held somewhere, reserve it. And a week later, I receved an e-mail asking me to pick up I can get it for you wholesale from the Central Library. Judging by the date-label, I was the first person to borrow it for over thirty years.

The narrative technique reminded me of Raymond Chandler and P G Wodehouse. In this respect: It is written in the first person, adopting a distictive voice, and maintaining it. This is not easy to do. I know, having tried it.

I've made other serendipitous discoveries at my local pub, which I may have mentioned from time to time. It has a few shelves of books, no doubt bought by the yard. Most of them are absolute rubbish. A 1929 guide to accountancy springs to mind. But amongst the dross there are a few pearls. Or there were, because they seem somehow to have found their way onto my own shelves at home. Well, the amount of money I spend in there, I'm entitled to a few perks, aren't I? No, I'm not. I'll take them back.

Here are three recommendations:

John Harris: Covenant with Death, which I've mentioned before.

Alfred Duggan: The Little Emperors. Duggan wrote historical novels thirty or forty years ago. I accept that he is a more serious novelist than, say Jean Plaidy, and I'm sure his research is impeccable. But, my God, he can be turgid. All the same I've read several of his books because he chooses such interestingly obscure periods of history for his plots. The first one I read was Count Behemond about the Norman nobleman of the late 11th century and his participation in the (first ?) crusade. Another was the story of Lepidus, the third member of the second Roman triumvirate with Mark Antony and Octavian.

The last one I read was The Little Emperors, which is set about 410 AD when the Romans started to withdraw from Britain. It's known that the Romano-British set up three of four of their own 'emperors', when they realised that Rome was too busy defending itself to bother about Britannia.

Sinclair Lewis: Dodsworth. I first read Lewis about 20 years ago, soon after I'd seen Elmer Gantry, the film in which Burt Lancaster won his Oscar. I've recently become reacquainted with him, reading Dodsworth, the story of a middle-aged businessman and his trip to Europe with his airhead wife. Lewis also wrote Babbitt, which gave the language a word for a self-important, self-satisfied, hypocritical middle-class businessman. Rather like an American version of those Yorkshiremen J B Priestley used to write about.

Small have continual plodders ever won,

Save base authority from others books.

Shakespeare. Love's Labour's Lost

Cicero's Imperium

I've just finished Imperium by Robert Harris. It's the story of Roman statesman Cicero's struggle to rise from his comparatively humble roots to become Consul of Rome. You wonder why he bothered because the office only lasted for a year and was shared in any case. No doubt there was money to made. I get the feeling that Harris has had to make a real effort to turn Cicero into some kind of hero, rather than a man on the make which I've no doubt he was.

Inevitably, the book reminded me of I, Claudius, at least the TV version. The dialogue is modern, not lapsing into cod-Latin but avoiding 21st century slang as well. I do have a problem, however, with the modern sensibility of the book. After all, it purports to be the memoir of Cicero's slave and secretary, Tiro, who apparently invented shorthand, a skill which is of great importance in the plot. It also enables Harris to get in a joke of hindsight when Tiro, boasting how easy his system is to learn, claims that one day even women might become secretaries.

Another interesting fact. Why are people seeking political office called 'candidates'? Because a Roman desiring election would wear a toga bleached particularly white - they were normally the natural colour of the wool from which they were made - so that they stood out from the crowd. 'Candida' means white or bright. Ironically, I suppose 'candid' has something to do with it.

Harris is a politico himself and seems keen to draw a few contemporary parallels, as when Tiro sniffs at those politicians who do not write their own speeches but employ slaves to do it. That reminds me of story of the time Churchill flew across the Atlantic to confer with Roosevelt. They came to an important agreement and parted, agreeing to announce it to their respective nations as soon as possible. Roosevelt got his speechwriters onto the job immediately, hoping to beat Churchill to the punch, and was amazed to turn on his radio next morning to hear Churchill make a brilliant address, which he had written on the plane home.

Harris also borrows from Nye Bevan, putting into Cicero's mouth words similar to those aimed at Eden during the Suez affair. 'I am not saying he isn't sincere, but if he is sincere, then he is too stupid to be a Prime Minister.'

When a tribune exercises his right to veto a bill, he is voted out of office before the end of his term, an action rather similar to the 'recall' of California's governor not so long ago. Many Romans see this as a dangerous surrender to demagoguery, and I'm sure many Americans would agree.

Most significant of all, the book records how Pompey fomented and exploited the people's fears of invasion by pirates to set up autocratic government and reduce civil liberties. There are no prizes for guessing the contemporary allusions there.

Every day is a gift. But does it have to be a pair of socks?

Tony Soprano

I'll bet you a level Bradbury

We have made a covenant with death,
And with hell are we in agreement.


These are words from Isaiah (28:15).

The quotation is a good example of the typical form of Hebrew poetry. I'm sure there is a technical term for the practice of saying the same thing twice, using different words. Other examples are:

Thy word is a light unto my path

And a light unto my way. (Psalms 119:105)

There are six things which the Lord hates,

Seven which are an abomination to him. (Proverbs 6:16)

Interesting variation there, with a hint of Monty Python.

Here's a passage I particularly like:

. . .to preserve you from the evil woman,

From the smooth tongue of the adventuress.

Do not desire her beauty in your heart,

And do not let her capture you with her eyelashes;

For a harlot may be hired for a loaf of bread,

But an adulteress stalks an man's very life . . . (Prov 6:24-26).

What are the books that helped the English language to 'set'? The Bible (KJV), Shakespeare's Folio, The Book of Common Prayer, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. Maybe Malory as well. I heard Robert Fiske choose it as his book on Desert Island Discs, saying it was the only book that had ever made him cry. Must be a very hard man. Must read it, or try.

I started to think about these things when I picked up John Harris' novel, called Covenant with Death. It is the story of the build-up to the Battle of the Somme, told by one of the volunteers for a 'pal's batallion' raised in a Yorkshire City. Maybe not a great work of literature, but if only I could write as well. He draws a nice contrast between the boyish enthusiasm of the recruits and their growing cynicism. And between the shallow patriotism of those back home who think it's a stroll in the park to 'smash the Hun' and the men at the front, to whom it is a private war against 'Fritz'.

It seems disrespectful really that the only thing from the book that has sent me researching on the internet is the term 'Bradbury'. I should have guessed it meant money, but it didn't hit me until half way through the book. From then it was a short search to discover that the term 'Bradbury' was current from 1914 to1933 and referred to £1 and 10/- notes that bore the signature of Sir John Bradbury.

It's strange how good it felt to write 'ten shillings' like that - 10/-. I haven't done that for over thirty years.

The going up was worth the coming down

Kris Kristofferson