Dr. David Kepesh. A monologue on love and sex, and child abandonment, teaching and above all his longing for the breasts of Consuela the Cuban, whom he loves, whom he abandons and with whom he reconnects and photographs just before she has a mastectomy. In all a strange book. And for a short book, rather long. I haven’t read The Breast, perhaps it is a start of that.

I enjoy his novels very much so I sent for this, his first. It starts off like a rocket, and he writes really well but I thought it lost its way after a while, and I’m glad he found a more interesting world to write about.

Talking of a history of thirst Nick and Nora Charles never stop. I’m afraid I had to. I found the banter and the plot a lot more banal this time around. Too many cocktails. This level of public drunkeness. It's almost entirely about the next cocktail. Though interestingly written during Prohibition, so perhaps a love song to liquor is aloud. The Nora character seems to have been based on his lover Lillian Hellmann.

I was enjoying this and admiring how well he writes, until I suddenly lost all interest and saw why he got the sort of panning I had read which had up until then puzzled me. I’ll give it another go, because he is the real thing.

A wonderful novel, set in a long hot English summer (yes they do happen) where Pauline watches her daughter undergoing the same betrayal by her husband that she had experienced. The structure is simple and elegant, but the emotions are wonderfully handled, as she watches the adultery in helpless dismay. I like Penelope Lively a lot and here she produces a sudden and unexpected and highly satisfactory end to a very fine book.

Brother of the famous novelist, discovering his triple by-pass has left him impotent at 39 either dies under the knife, or survives and flees to Israel to join a commune, run by a radical right wing Kibbutzim. Meanwhile the writer of the book either dies from the same surgery or marries an Englishwoman and tries to live in Chiswick. The book keeps shifting, shape and narrative, and while it is fiendishly clever, it also becomes slightly annoying. Every person in it has a good reason to destroy some of Zuckermans writing, and they are all angry with him in some form for writing about them, although he denies it is them, and in some parts invents whole scale unlikely action scenes, where a passenger tries to hijack an El Al plane from Israel. So it is a discussion of the novelist and his role in life. A large part of it is a long and highly argumentative discussion about what it means to be a Jew in Israel, as opposed to an American Jew. For the non-Jew this is simply hard to understand, so I turned again to remind me, to a book about major anti-semitism….

A History of Terror in the name of God And an all too stark reminder of just how foul and consistently horrendously the Jewish people have been treated through the centuries. It’s nauseating, and unrelenting and shameful.

Is there anything more satisfying than a murder mystery at a hotel? Yes a murder mystery with Maigret in the basement serving quarters of a smart Parisian hotel. The Penguin Classics continue.

The story of Philby, here told through the eyes of the great betrayal of friendship, first with Nicholas Eliot and also James Angleton. Elliot is so in denial he even fights hard to get Philby, deeply suspected by MI5, reinstated by MI6. What is fun is to see the torture that Philby went through, thanks to his betrayal of friends, wives and country, becoming virtually an alcoholic zombie by the end. And this book suggests quite plausibly that Philby did not run, but was carefully pushed into fleeing to Moscow, since it spared the Secret Service the embarrassment of a public trial, and a potential hanging, and the Security world could not afford another scandal after Blake, Buster Crabbe etc. Nicely told, intriguing world of the Cambridge Spies and the upper class twits who seemed to think a decent school was all that was required.