The Brooknerian

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.