Light reading but interesting history of the Sixteenth Century Sopranos. Clears out a few facts from fictions about this Spanish family who took the Vatican and then half Italy, helped and witnessed (a bit) by Machiavelli. I became convinced that Lucrezia was much maligned, that the celebrated incest with her father was indeed just black propaganda from their enemies the Sforzas, that Cesare was mentally ill and a thug, (he murders his sister’s husband) that Pope Alexander VI (father Borgia), was quite interesting, that the Vatican was better when they shagged girls, that with Alexander and Julius quite a lot of really great art was commissioned (Michelangelo for example) and that the whole Medieval Catholic con job that made them so wealthy (the sale of forgiveness for your sins) was so easy to see through it’s amazing the Reformation didn’t start sooner.

From the late lamented, superbly talented, hilarious Nora Effron, this remains a brilliant book. First published in 1983, it was an immediate smash because it is hilarious. I defy anyone to read the first chapter and not laugh. But it lasts, because like all great comedy it is based in the tragic. The protagonist is a professional cook, (the book was ground-breaking for including real recipes) a New Yorker who is betrayed in Washington by her famous husband writer, no prizes for identifying Nora’s second husband Carl Bernstein. She is seven months pregnant with her second child, when she discovers he is having an affair with an Embassy wife, and the book is simply her attempts to come to grips with this betrayal by her stud Jewish prince, fleeing back to New York, her Group, and her relatives, all of whom are nuts. The book is both a lament and a wonderful revenge. She turns tears into laughter, healthy, painful and very difficult. She does this effortlessly. So lightly written, and so deftly done, this is the revenge novel of all time, and was turned into a movie by Mike Nichols. The book has sold continuously and has even got better because in 2004 Nora wrote a short and wonderful preface, nailing her ex, and particularly the Jays, for how they had behaved in the wake of the book’s success, hilariously, as if they had been betrayed. This is the sugar plum on the cake. Distance has increased the comedy and pomposity of the self-justifying betrayers, and the colluding husband (Anthony Jay) who feel aggrieved that she betrayed them. Great stuff. A kind of Jewish Vanity Fair meets Jane Austen that has you cheering in your seat for all betrayed women. She is very, very good on men. And never unjustly. A superb lady, great company and very gifted, I was lucky to have spent even a little time with her, often in Vegas where she was, unexpectedly, a devoted and excellent craps player. This book has lasted, and will last. If you haven’t tried it, do.

Surely the Mann Booker winner right here, but I have said that sort of thing before only to gasp later with surprise, not even nominated. This is a very brilliant book, brilliant in luminescent language, brilliant in conception, brilliant as the stars, whose ancient light creates us, and finally contains us. Sparkling with metaphor, coruscating with words, only a great poet could have written such a work, a memento mori, to the living, to the dead, to the lost worlds of love. It is literally about light and death. A vast prose poem, written in measured sentences that seem almost in meter, about the memory of first love, about loss, about grief, and about life itself, this strange ineluctable progress of being towards non being, about what we are when we are not and how only memory keeps us alive in the minds of others, and how inconstant memory itself is, until we too slough off our selves and pass into the shade, into the darkness of non being. A great non Catholic novel, the complete antidote to the seedy love stories of Graham Greene, here there is no God, no Daddy to comfort us and wipe us down and forgive us our trespasses, there is only the differing views of others, the tiny points of light perceived only by the individual, that distinguishes our viewpoint from another’s. The tale told by an actor (to be or not) who himself cannot grasp the nature of himself, and whose occluded view of reality has obscured even his own life from his own memory. The fifteen year old and his shameful love affair with his best friend’s mother, the anguish of a father for a dead child, about grief and loss, about recreating life on film and above all about metaphor, so many great and fresh perceptions (lion yellow, filming is like a nativity scene) every line is laden with ore, demands to be re-read and savoured. Oh yes thank you.

A most disappointing novel from a fine writer who seems to have lost his way here, with a series of interlocking stories involving improbable figures such as L. Ron Hubbard and Rudolph Hess and managing to spark almost no interest from them. It has joined my pile of orphan books, to await another time, and another look. I’m sorry because I think he is a really good author.

Started to read this in French, (Pretentious? Moi?) backstage at the Olympics as a very good way to avoid worrying about the upcoming show. It worked too. His prose is so simple and basic that it is a really easy read. And a very fine novel.

I very much enjoyed this book of my contemporary and old pal Johnny’s reminiscences and observations on comedy because he does try and stick to the truth, which isn’t always pretty. He tells tales of Cambridge and Footlights and a brilliant career directing and writing the hilarious series Yes Minister on television. I wish he had spent a little more time on his successes, Nuns on The Run and My Cousin Vinny, and a little less on the less successful Clue and Bilko, but perhaps it is in the nature of things that one wants to justify the things that didn’t quite work, since he is illustrating and exemplifying how to do comedy, with a series of helpful rules. Anyway a thoroughly entertaining book by a thoughtful and a clever man I have been proud to call my friend since since 1962.