The Brooknerian

It's traditional to post on Twitter one's reads of the year. I'm not in the same league as those lightning-fast folk for whom the above pile would represent the books digested in an average month, or even week. I'm not sure I feel too much envy. Let slow reading be a thing. No Anita? a contributor enquired. And it is true: I sometimes take long breaks. I first read her in 1990, and read them all - a mere handful in those days. From then on, yearly, I'd wolf down her novels as they appeared: usually in late August, or so it seems in sunset-lit memory. I prefer, perhaps, especially at times such as now, a long digressive immersive meandering novel, a novel to get lost in, and the nineteenth century usually supplies. Of the above I think I loved Quentin Durward most. You read it and you're in the nineteenth century again, and yet also in the fifteenth. It's a strange, complex, mazy fantastical reading experience. (The bisque bust, by the way, is a Robinson and...

Anita Brookner was never one for easy hyperbole, only for that which was earned and justified by time. One wonders what she would have made of 2020. No doubt she would have reserved judgement. Her essays and reviews are often at their most piquant when considering something from which she withholds praise. I've been reading 'Descent into the Untestable', a review in Soundings of a book of 1980 on regression in the arts from the eighteenth into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Analysis of large movements, notions such as the Enlightenment and Romanticism, will be familiar to readers of Brookner. In Providence (1982), Kitty Maule and her students mount lofty seductive arguments: Existentialism as a late manifestation of Romanticism - and the like. But Dr Brookner herself would caution her own pupils: Art doesn't love you and cannot console you. Here she argues for the limitations of art. 'Artistic traditions are self-generating and at best reflexive. One cannot...

I wondered that she should waste so much energy fighting over a little matter like wearing hats in chapel, but then I told myself that, after all, life was like that for most of us - the small unpleasantnesses rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction. A shared bathroom, a newly brushed carpet, the funny little bags you get tea in abroad, a bombed-out church: Excellent Women depicts a world as distant as Pompeii. Manners are antique too: a celibate clergyman is no cause for speculation, a spinster may happily disclaim the slightest hint of experience, and everyone smokes. It's funny, of course, because it is Barbara Pym, but funny in a particular and hard-to-define way. Self-deprecating doesn't quite cut it. Irony? Mockery? A celebration of the trivial and the ridiculous? Her voice, so prized, is unmistakable. 'Do we need tea?' she echoed. 'But Miss Lathbury......

As ever, Brookner scholar Dr Peta Mayer offers insightful comment (see Liverpool University Press blog here ). Her reading (misreading?) of a photograph of a smoking Brookner in a Wildean pose is particularly tangy. I myself have spied in Brookner's images wily references and analogues. Were the photographers in on such jokes, one wonders? The National Portrait Gallery holds another Lucy Anne Dickens ( here ), possibly taken at the same sitting as the Wilde shot. (The chair is the same, though not the sweater.) The chair to the side, the body in profile, the sidelong glance... the lamp... What bells ring in the subversive Brooknerian mind? Step forward, Madame Récamier...

I read Hardy as a child, or in my teens. A favourite teacher introduced him, and, alert to signs, I took it as the done thing to consume the lot. At some point I read The Trumpet-Major , possibly in the very edition pictured. I remember little, my reading memory erased by other encounters. Hardy cannot by any stretch of the imagination be deemed a Brooknerian writer. This was but one of the reasons for a prejudice I've maintained to this day. Other reasons include a suspicion of auto-didacts and an impression of awkward style. Having read, in recent years, a lot of Scott (having exhausted the Brooknerian reservoirs of James, Dickens, Trollope), I idly wondered how Hardy tackled the historical novel genre. The Trumpet-Major has a backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Real figures - George III, Captain Hardy - intermingle with fictional. Where the novel departs from the Scott model is in its flash-forwards. Hardy cannot resist reminding us that all these people in what's ostensibly a...

This mere four-minute piece ( click here for the BBC Archive #OnThisDay feed ) should be top of the list for any Brooknerian, not least because it is, to my knowledge, the only video of the author freely available. Anita Brookner made only rare media appearances. Buried in archives are, I know, a Channel 4 interview with Hermione Lee and a programme (in the 100 Great Paintings series) Brookner made in 1980, still only an art historian, on, I think, Delacroix. We should be gladdened by this marvellous vouchsafement. There she is: stylish and a-swagger; trenchant in her commitment to the truth.

Not too skilled at literary multitasking, and having enough tasks of other kinds to complete, I don't often have more than one book 'on the go'. But sometimes very different texts will complement one another. As the year darkens I find myself at once in 1870s New York and one of those weird hothouse Italianate courts beloved of Jacobean dramatists. The Age of Innocence depicts 'a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs', while Thomas Middleton's The Maiden's Tragedy is about knowingness and frankness, but not among everyone. In both there is a gender divide, and a further polarity between women who 'know' and those who don't. Edith Wharton distinguishes the 'nice' from the 'free': the virginal May Welland is that 'terrifying product of the social system ... the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything', and for Mi...

The available photographs of Anita Brookner date almost exclusively from her fifties onwards. We have a school photo, but nothing from her later youth or early middle age. Most available photos are staged publicity shots. They follow conventions. Brookner no doubt gave as much thought to the tenor of such images as she evidently did to the character of the information she was willing to disclose in the few interviews she allowed. She doesn't often smile. A set of 'new' photos is available to view on Ebay at the moment (type 'Anita Brookner photo'). They comprise a collection of images turned out of an old newspaper archive. We see Brookner reading Spycatcher on her familiar striped sofa. We see her in a flowered dress smiling (this is from 1989, at a Lewis Percy signing). We see her clutching  Hotel du Lac at the 1984 Booker Prize dinner. And we see a rare impromptu shot of a startled Brookner in what looks like a hotel lobby. I suspect this was taken on one of he...

Little seems to happen for much of Washington Square,  Henry James's short novel of 1880. Catherine Sloper, apparently unmarriageable, but also an heiress, receives the attention of the young handsome plausible impoverished Morris Townsend. His motives are obvious if unconfirmed, or never fully confirmed. Catherine's father strongly objects to the match, and the bulk of the novel concerns the conflicts that result. The ending of the novel is often seen as its best feature, and that was my experience the first time I read it, in my youth. But it is how Catherine arrives at her understanding that should be the focus of both study and marvel. James's 'plain' heroine is really nothing of the sort. The manoeuvres her consciousness achieves are conveyed with astonishing deftness and subtlety: I think I simply missed them first time around. That she might 'accomplish something by ingenious concessions to form' is Catherine's great, quiet discovery. It is also, ...

My Dream Dinner Party,  in which a celebrity's dream guests' recorded output is spliced together, is a concept that's been knocking about BBC Radio 4 for a few years. It just about works, but has obvious limitations. I was surprised when British actress Alison Steadman 'invited' Brookner to join Charles Aznavour, James Stewart, Beryl Reid and John Lennon. The result is arch and artificial, but also a delight, insofar as it makes available passages from Brookner's media interviews from her 1980s heyday. We hear her discoursing on writing as therapy, her parents, and her style. Several points. Steadman was apparently introduced to Brookner's work after a friend gave her Strangers (2009) in the 80s. Would Brookner really have accepted a glass of wine with such enthusiasm? And mightn't she have left the party early, certainly before Lennon got out his guitar? Brookner once called the guitar a specious instrument. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000m575 ...

I was delighted to visit the Loch Lomond and the sublime landscape above Aberfoyle, having read Rob Roy during the lockdown. The weather was cool but sunny with some good cloud shadow. The heather on the hills was of a hue so heavenly as to be almost unbelievable.

Gallery-going nowadays can be a strain. Warders have been made into martinets: you must walk in this direction, wait here, move on, never linger. Some appear resentful you should wish to indulge in anything as frivolous as art. In the Palace of Holyroodhouse I asked a question about a painting of George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822. Who was the man kneeling before the king? The kilted attendant performed a pantomime first of not hearing - I had to repeat - then of appearing not to recognise my words as English. I said again: 'Do you know who is presenting a gift to the king?' 'I do.' 'Well, who is it?!' Eventually, sulky, and with unaccountable emphasis: 'The Duke of Hamilton.' Wilkie, Entrance of George IV at Holyroodhouse (Scott stands, at ground level, second from the left.) The palace is picturesque, laid out and furnished in decadent Carolean style. Beside the house rises the wildness of Arthur's Seat. The art, like...

I can now add Abbotsford House, Tweedbank, in the Scottish Borders, to a small list of writers' homes I've visited. (A list that comprises, for those interested, Hardy's Max Gate and birthplace, Dickens's houses in Portsmouth and Doughty Street, James's Lamb House, any number of Goethe - Häuser in Germany, and of course a certain block of flats in Elm Park Gardens, London, the only trip that included a meeting with the author in question.) Abbotsford isn't easy to access without a car. I do drive, but never on holiday. I wished I had my car with me today: rain sheeted down as I trudged along a deserted A-road through countryside cultivated but rugged. Abbotsford is a genteel fake baronial nineteenth-century castle in sight of the rushing Tweed. Scott built it from novel proceeds, but he didn't enjoy the finished article for long and his last years were ruined by ill-health and debt. Abbotsford House View of the Tweed Back of the house ...

It is unmissable but oddly neglected. I don't just mean the last-century smog-discolouring, but also the lack of interest from passers-by. I felt rather self-conscious taking my photos. It is possible to go up the monument but not at present. On upper levels stand blackened statues of, no doubt, Dandie Dinmont, Effie Deans, Ivanhoe - but you can't make them out.

How near the past is. Travelling by train from London to Edinburgh, I passed halts I'd previously only read of. Beyond Newcastle the land grew gradually wilder, mistier: forests, rocky descents, expanses of heath stretching into foggy distances, sudden glimpses of the grey sea. I was reading Scott at the time, appropriately. The Scottish Borders is his world as much as the Highlands, probably more so. Always I come back to Virginia Woolf's assessment of a scene in The Antiquary : ...all come together, tragic, irrelevant, comic, drawn, one knows not how, to make a whole ... which, as always, Scott creates carelessly, without a word of comment, as if the parts grew together without his willing it, and broke into ruin again without his caring. In Guy Mannering , Scott's second novel, Scott tells, early on, of the disappearance of a small child. It is a distressing episode. Later, much later, when the child, now a man, is restored, the scene is overwhelmingly affecting - becaus...

Will anyone ever get round to writing Anita Brookner's biography? It is less likely than it might have been once. The golden age of literary biography was in the last century. Simply, the economics of publishing probably wouldn't support a latter-day Bevis Hillier or Norman Sherry, whose multi-volume John Betjeman and Graham Greene lives respectively were the fruit of decades of work (Sherry was said to have visited every place Greene ever set foot in). Then there are the lesser 'hack' biographies that often appear more quickly after an author's death. These are culled largely from material already in the public domain. Such a biographer might find so private and retiring figure as Anita Brookner a recalcitrant subject for such a job. She was a public figure, but only up to a point, and only really from her fifties onwards. Any more comprehensive life would entail a lot of research and a lot of interviews. She herself gave few interviews and rarely appeared on the r...

Titian, The Death of Actaeon Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto Perseus and Andromeda Bacchus and Ariadne , left - referenced in Brookner's The Next Big Thing Nicolaes Maes, Girl at a Window , 1653-5, on loan from the Rijksmuseum It was a great pleasure at last to visit the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery, curtailed by lockdown but now resurrected. We find Titian's late masterworks painted for Philip II reunited for the first time. They're starry attractions and a great novelty, but finer still is the feeling of being in a gallery again. The National Gallery is much changed. It's practically deserted. You must book, cannot just wander in. It has lost that old communal feel. At times its bigger halls could feel like railway station concourses. Now one might be in Europe, not England. A great discovery downstairs, barely advertised: a Maes show, Dutch Golden Age painter. And beautifully lit, by which I mean almost in darkness.

When Ford Madox Ford wrote his Fifth Queen trilogy in the 1900s the reputation of historical fiction was on a downward slope. The extreme popularity of Scott in the early part of the previous century had declined gradually but relentlessly. The twentieth century saw the genre consigned to the schoolroom or to those sections of bookshops where the covers are lurid and the often embossed. Then the second half of the century happened and the historical novel was again respectable. Examples won the fledgling Booker Prize. Novels grew in length, scope and depth. Some would no doubt posit Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall novels as the apotheosis. Novels are the product of their own historical contexts, and none more so than historical novels. Mantel's Tudor past is perhaps no more authentic than Ford's. Both cover similar grounds. It is all really a matter of taste. Do you favour Mantel's gritty hyper-realism or Ford and Scott's romance? Do you hate tushery and gadzookery, o...

An undoubted Establishment figure - Keeper of the Queen's Pictures no less - Sir Anthony Blunt was exposed as a spy in the 1960s (an episode of The Crown deals with the affair), though the information wasn't publicised until Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979. Anita Brookner, who worked with and for Blunt at the Courtauld, was unaware of his secret past. (She would later discover, on publication of Peter Wright's Spycatcher , that she had herself been unwittingly used to gather information possibly useful to the Soviets.) Max Hastings, writing in the Spectator in August 1980, laid into those he saw as forgiving or making light of Blunt's misdemeanours: all those former students, colleagues and hangers-on who continued to be seduced by his charisma and didn't demonstrate the sort of kneejerk condemnation Hastings (and the Leaderene, no doubt) would have seen as confirmation of the right stuff. Brookner's letter to the Spectator of a few weeks later was nua...

I'm surely not alone in suffering the odd reading quandary. I flit from book to book, feel restless, unrooted. My time is limited, my tastes restricted. I prefer longer novels and rarely enjoy short works. I favour the nineteenth century. How I ever found Anita Brookner is anyone's guess. But I do like style. Down long years I read all of Trollope, James, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and the like. Some time back I started on Scott - long avoided - and adored him. Rereading is always an option, but one likes new things. They brighten and lighten. I settled on Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South a few weeks ago. I'm back teaching (if to a rather ridiculously small group ('bubble', if you will)), so time is at a premium. North and South is an elegantly written novel, full of social, political and human interest, and it takes us into regions and corners of Victorian England other novelists ignored or, as in the case of Hard Times , obfuscated with satire a...

Susan Hill, whose lockdown reading recommendations are a weekly joy, chomps in the latest Spectator on a T-bone in her reading of American crime fiction, but finds time for the 'lobster bisque' that is an old favourite. The novels of Anita Brookner seemed to have vanished without trace but they have all now reappeared in a fine series with new cover designs. My copies were old and battered so I have bought the set, because Brookner is one of the women writers I most admire, and re-reading her in new copies helps me consider them afresh. V.S. Naipaul despised her work, probably without having read it, but that is just an added recommendation. If you have been told they are ‘all the same’ — well, only in the sense that Bach’s organ preludes or piano variations are all the same, because Brookner’s works are indeed variations on a theme. Think of them that way and her genius will reveal itself over these wonderful novels.

The reason people don’t read Scott anymore is that they think he’s prolix. They are right. There’s no getting around the fact: he’s a deeply prosy, long-winded writer. If the only thing that will hold your attention is a string of staccato action set-pieces you will surely struggle with him. But the secret to enjoying him is to accept this. Instead of impatiently yearning for things to hurry up, you need to surrender yourself to the prose, to sink into it as into a warm bath. Adam Roberts, 'The Victorian novel: a guide to reading in lockdown', Spectator , 16 May 2020 Adam Roberts was one of my teachers at university in the early 1990s. He's still there but is now also an acclaimed science-fiction author. His recent Spectator recommendations gratify me in that they accord with my own preferences: Scott ( The Antiquary, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian ), Thackeray ( The Newcomes ) and Eliot ( Daniel Deronda ). I applaud his impeccable taste, in particular his defence...

Rumour has it the sky has seldom been as blue since pre-industrial times. One is reminded of the skies of Tiepolo, or of Boucher - as experienced so memorably at the Wallace Collection by the protagonist of Brookner's A Family Romance . Tiepolo, Rest on the Flight into Egypt : last seen at the recent exhibition in Stuttgart Boucher, The Rising of the Sun

Three paintings in British collections depicting scenes in Scott: John Everett Millais, The Bride of Lammermoor , City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery James Drummond, The Porteous Mob, National Gallery of Scotland Richard Parkes Bonington, Quentin Durward at Li ège , Castle Museum, Nottingham

Despite many appearances to the contrary, James's novels are tightly plotted. Even the late masterpieces, The Wings of the Dove or The Golden Bowl , apparently so distanced and cerebral, harbour sensational conspiracies at their heart. But in the latter novel James, in the second half, turns the tables - on the conspirators, and on the reader - as Maggie becomes less victim than victor. The growth of her feeling of suspicion is difficult to trace but it predates the moment of revelation, that 'first sharp falsity she had known in her life, to touch at all or be touched by; it had met her like some bad-faced stranger surprised in one of the thick-carpeted corridors of a house of quiet on a Sunday afternoon'. 'Stories with a twist' - and in the Brookner canon one thinks of the last-minute reveals in Providence, Undue Influence and others - involve legerdemain, also often a degree of bad faith between writer and reader: we who have been led to believe one thing m...

The Spectator Annual 1992 Lived through, the Nineties seemed a dull and disappointing decade after its glitzier predecessor. Now one looks back with longing on an era of civilised quietude and gentility. The cover says it all: Mr Major temporarily distracted from a game of cricket on a sunny afternoon. Within: a time capsule; names long-forgotten or still very much with us; antique attitudes (Auberon Waugh's 'Why we over-50s are quite happy with Europe'); Jeffrey Bernard's incomparable 'Low Life' columns; and a piece by Anita Brookner, 'How to be very, very popular', a review of a novel by Mary Wesley. (I get confused between Mary Wesley and Rosamunde Pilcher, whose nostalgic countrified books were also once very, very popular. They continue to be so, oddly, in Germany: at Christmas in Stuttgart I had a stilted conversation with an old lady who knew little of England other than what she had gleaned from the work of Rosamunde Pilcher.) I find M...

Brookner once said she saw in The Golden Bowl, of all James's novels, evidence of the 'madness of art'. No doubt she had in mind his many wild extended metaphors, metaphors that take wing and carry the reader into quite other worlds. Here Adam and Charlotte sense they possibly shouldn't outstay their welcome in Adam's grandson's nursery: Treated on such occasions as at best a pair of dangling and merely nominal court-functionaries, picturesque hereditary triflers entitled to the petites entrées but quite external to the State, which began and ended with the Nursery, they could only retire, in quickened sociability, to what was left them of the Palace, there to digest their gilded insignificance and cultivate, in regard to the true Executive, such snuff-taking ironies as might belong to rococo chamberlains moving among china lap-dogs.

One takes delight, in these curious times, in curious details, such as this passage of rare specificity in The Golden Bowl (New York Edition). Devotees of the full Henry James cosplay experience should note that Adam Verver's necktie in the first edition was 'sprigged'. He wore every day of the year, whatever the occasion, the same little black ‘cutaway’ coat, of the fashion of his younger time; he wore the same cool-looking trousers, chequered in black and white—the proper harmony with which, he inveterately considered, was a white-dotted blue satin necktie; and, over his concave little stomach, quaintly indifferent to climates and seasons, a white duck waistcoat.

I beguile the time with Shakespeare and James. I'd left Trollope's Vicar of Bullhampton on the shelf for years - years after I read the rest of Trollope - and I must have sensed why. It's a dull book, but with everything going for it: characters high and low, intriguing issues (sex work, daringly, among them). But it has little jeopardy, the conventional love story is dreary, and the prostitution (Trollope uses the word) theme proves hesitant and too slight: Trollope veers between sympathy and condemnation. We never see Carry Brattle's life in London. There are no Clarissa -style scenes. Henry IV Part 2 : Was there ever such a perfect play? The high and the low here complement one another. It would be formulaic, if it weren't brilliant, the way we alternate between the poetry of the court and the prose of Falstaff's world. The story, concerning various plots and treacheries, is negligible. What matters is the language. The King and Falstaff are given the b...

The much-loved Backlisted podcast ( here ) returns with a 'lockdown' episode that includes a lot of Anita Brookner talk. Prompted by discussion about  Hotel du Lac , never the most representative Brookner, the chat meanders pleasantly on to the potential for compiling an Anita Brookner 'Top Ten'. At a loose end myself, though this week at the chalkface entertaining the children of keyworkers, I considered the question myself. I'm sure there are similar such lists elsewhere on this blog - I forget, and I don't particularly want to consult them anyhow. Of course, Brookner - like Henry James, like Trollope, indeed like many prolific authors - passed through phases. Brookner's novels, I contend, fall into three, neatly divided by the decades she wrote in: the raw, vital 80s; the settled magisterial 90s; the bleak, experimental 2000s. A Brookner novel from the 80s seems very different from any of her final works - just as 'James I', 'James II' ...

From The Vicar of Bullhampton , another delicately spiced character sketch to break up your day: He was a very handsome man, about six feet high, with large light grey eyes, a straight nose, and a well cut chin. His lips were thin, but his teeth were perfect,—only that they had been supplied by a dentist. His grey hair encircled his head, coming round upon his forehead in little wavy curls, in a manner that had conquered the hearts of spinsters by the dozen in the cathedral. It was whispered, indeed, that married ladies would sometimes succumb, and rave about the beauty, and the dignity, and the white hands, and the deep rolling voice of the Rev. Henry Fitzackerley Chamberlaine. Indeed, his voice was very fine when it would be heard from the far-off end of the choir during the communion service, altogether trumping the exertion of the other second-rate clergyman who would be associated with him at the altar. And he had, too, great gifts of preaching, which he would exercise once a we...

In the absence of more reliable signposts one seeks parallels in literature. In the time ahead, when every day, for many, will seem like Christmas Day, one thinks of Anna Durrant in Anita Brookner's Fraud (1992), the lonely walk Anna takes across a deserted, Pompeii-still London in windless air under a low grey sky. Later in the novel another character, the elderly Mrs Marsh, nurses her son Nick through a bout of the flu. His convalescence is powerfully described, the reduction in his routine, his devotion to the predictable rhythms of the Radio 4 schedule. A recent New Yorker piece ( here ) considered episodes of social distancing in Victorian novels: Bleak House, Jane Eyre . Elsewhere in Brookner there are more than several chapters on illness and recovery. One recalls the end of Look at Me (1983), Frances cared for like a child after her traumatic night walk; or the horribly extended migraine that afflicts the protagonist in A Misalliance (1986) and the blessed ministrat...

Among several scuppered plans was a visit to see the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery, now closed. Seven late masterworks were included, reunited for the first time since they sat in Titian's studio in the second half of the sixteenth century. Paintings would take years, returned to after long absences. 'According to eye witnesses,' writes Martin Gayford, lucky enough to see the show, in this week's Spectator , 'Titian would begin a work, then lean it against the wall. Some time later he would scrutinise what he had done as if it were a "mortal enemy", add a touch or two, set it aside again to dry - and so on until he was satisfied ... there is a controversy about whether some of his late works ... were finished or not.' Brooknerians will know Titian from the much earlier Bacchus and Ariadne , part of the National Gallery's permanent collection. In The Next Big Thing Julius Herz, one of Brookner's later and most debilitated protagon...

What a joy is this passage from Trollope's The Vicar of Bullhampton. I love the sideswipe at Dickens, and the bit about Wycherley's plays is a sophisticated treat. As to Miss Marrable herself nobody could doubt that she was a lady; she looked it in every inch. There were not, indeed, many inches of her, for she was one of the smallest, daintiest, little old women that ever were seen. But now, at seventy, she was very pretty, quite a woman to look at with pleasure. Her feet and hands were exquisitely made, and she was very proud of them. She wore her own grey hair of which she showed very little, but that little was always exquisitely nice. Her caps were the perfection of caps. Her green eyes were bright and sharp, and seemed to say that she knew very well how to take care of herself. Her mouth, and nose, and chin, were all well-formed, small, shapely, and concise, not straggling about her face as do the mouths, noses, and chins of some old ladies—ay, and of some young ladies ...

Seeking solace can be a tricky business. As the news worsened I immersed myself in the novels of the past; but the serpent of unease wriggles beneath the seemingly most innocent of flowers. Yet literature is perhaps only great when it is also subversive. Scott's Quentin Durward depicts a young Scottish gentleman abroad in the forests of fifteenth-century France. So far so sylvan and romantic, but Scott has other ideas: at pains to emphasise the anachronism of Durward's devotion to chivalry in a world of low politics that has left such ideals behind. Trollope's The Warden should be safer territory, I thought. I read it years ago. Indeed it retains much charm: Trollope, we might recall, conceived the novel while wandering one midsummer evening the tranquil environs of Salisbury Cathedral. But modernity intrudes, the eschewing of tradition and the beginnings of a soulless corporate sensibility in Mr Harding's ejection from his comfortable but unjustifiable war...