I continued my reading of the excellent Beevor, with this study of the return of de Gaulle to Paris, and the stories of Hemmingway etc. Unfinished and left in France for later travel. I squirrel books away in France so I don’t have to carry them all the time…

A magnificent history of the nemesis that awaited the civilians of Berlin, Prussia and Eastern Germany with the arrival of the Red Army. Four million rapes, twelve year olds on bikes trying to stop tanks, the full irony of the cowardly end of the grotesque Nazi leadership.

The best of these unrelated articles is Season on the Chalk, about the huge belts of chalk that form the English South Downs and Beachy Head (the White Cliffs of Dover) and then go under the channel, emerging in the champagne district of France. Filled with interesting facts about chalk and why it isn’t limestone, facts I have sadly already forgotten…

I couldn’t decide whether it was merely interesting at times or truly awful. About a wife who organises her husband into an affair with a celebrity whom she adores. An odd creature. I read it though, so she can tell a story.

A fine short novel. Very good. Booker winner surely. A must read.

A fine and very well written brief history of the Regency Period. She writes well, and is particularly good at set pieces. The Peterloo Massacre is very well done for example. Much about the Prince Regent, (later George IV) his wife Caroline, and people such as Byron and Caroline Lamb. I think she is really good.

A marvellous book. I had actually already read it when I met the author at a Book Fair in LA but he presented me with a copy and autographed it for me so it is entirely appropriate that the book is about books and their owners and collecting and first editions. It is very eloquently written.

‘ Two screenplays for TV. I was reading about William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and this is the same sort of story – the incredible inhumanity of boys in a group. Something I know a little about, and how it soon becomes bullying and then out-right fascism. William Boyd discusses this in a nice long intro about his own schooling at a public school in Scotland. He is about seven years behind me and the difference seems to be that we were still allowed to flog junior boys. (Some privilege eh?) Still the same senseless cruelty. Not dissimilar from the extreme example in the Hitler Bunker, which I am also reading about. Here the bullied boy comes back for revenge, and the upper class twit is saved by the middle class boy who has partially betrayed him. It is the full working out of the British class system. One wonders how this evolved, out of society or out of the desire to create a certain kind of society. Perhaps both. A school mirrors both society and the sort of society that educators, like Dr Arnold at Rugby, wished to create. Boyd’s best thought is that growing up in public school allows no growth of the private person, and there is an inability to get in touch with this private self. That and responding to the opposite sex…

The new collection of vaguely linked short stories is a return to form for him, and an example of what he does best, conveying character through dialogue. These short stories are almost play-like in their lack of descriptive prose, but his characters talk, bicker and despair and come to life immediately. Happy to see he’s back.