So, what have I bought since New Year?

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As you no doubt know, I was only buying 24 books last year. It was entirely self-imposed, in an effort to read more books from my shelves – and, by the end of the year, because I don’t have much space in my lovely little flat. When the sanctions were lifted on January 1st, what did I buy?

We’re three weeks into 2018, and I haven’t gone completely crazy. That’s partly because I got lots of books I really wanted for my birthday and Christmas presents (thanks friends and fam!) and partly because I’ve decided to Be a Bit Sensible. So, I’ve only bought a handful of books so far. Basically I deserve a medal or Nobel laureate etc.

Ok, I took a week break after starting this post and writing those first paragraphs, and in that time I went to a great secondhand bookshop in Wantage with my friend Lucy, and we did go a little crazy. So I may need to return that medal. So – what have I bought in January?

Let’s start with the books I got in Wantage, which is the left-hand pile:

The Reluctant Cook by Ethelind Fearon

I didn’t realise that The Reluctant Hostess was the first of a series – it’s a fun mid-century humourous book about a self-deprecating housewife. I.e. my jam completely.

The Poet’s Corner by Max Beerbohm

Every now and then I threaten to myself that I’m going to collect all the King Penguin books, because they’re so beautiful. But then lots of them are on lakes or moths or anything I’m not interested in. But this one had to come home with me – and was a present from Lucy, as we each picked one of the other’s books to be a belated birthday present.

How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist by Gerald Durrell

Adding to my pile of humorous non-fiction by Mr Durrell – always good to put something on the shelves that is guaranteed to be fun whenever it comes off the shelves.

The Unnatural Behaviour of Mrs Hooker by Eileen Marsh

I don’t know anything about this author or this book, but that title is so beguiling. Does anybody know anything about it? I was also provoked into buying it by the subtitle ‘a book for women’. We’ll SEE, Eileen Marsh.

The Three Brontes by May Sinclair

How come every 20th novelist wrote biographies too? I’m intrigued to see how this book compares to May Sinclair’s novel The Three Sisters, which is vaguely based on the Bronte sisters. (But not, dear LibraryThing, the same book.)

Up the Country by Emily Eden

After loving Eden’s novels The Semi-Detached House and The Semi-Attached Couple earlier in the year, I was excited to find her book of letters from India.

Mr Punch in the Family Circle

This is an edited collection of Punch sketches – in both senses, since there are images and skits – to do with the family. And, yes, A.A. Milne features. It’s a lovely edition too – will be fun to dip into.

Selected Letters by Charles Morgan

I read a novel by Morgan in about 2003, and have been meaning to read something else by him ever since – this collection of letters is apparently selected based on being about writing and the writer’s life, which is ideal.

And onto the right-hand pile – and the books that didn’t come from Wantage, but have come in fits and starts over the first few weeks of January.

Often I am Happy by Jens Christian Grondahl

I loved JCG’s novel Virginia, and have now got… three more books by him waiting. I hadn’t heard of this one, and hadn’t realised that it had been translated – it looks lovely, and it was on sale at Blackwells.

The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson

I picked this up in a charity shop, and I feel like I’ll take the plunge and read some of Robinson’s essays if I only fill the house with enough copies. I started one of them once and felt wildly out of my depth… one day. If nothing else, at least the charity benefited.

Plays 4 by Alan Ayckbourn

I’ve been on an Ayckbourn binge with audiobooks – more anon – and found this collection for £1 in Blackwells. Not the same as seeing them on stage, but apparently the season for Ayckbourn revivals is not quite yet. Well, not in the south. The north is seemingly a perennial Ayckbourn revival.

Company in the Evening by Ursula Orange
Begin Again by Ursula Orange
Landscape in Sunlight by Elizabeth Fair

All the Furrowed Middlebrow reprints came out while I was restricting my book buying, so obvi I went back and bought a handful of them when 2018 began. I needed those Ursula Oranges while the opportunity was there.

The Curtain by Milan Kundera

I had some book tokens from work, and this long essay by Kundera seems really interesting. And can keep the other unread Kundera books I’ve got waiting company.

Appointment in Arezzo by Alan Taylor

And the other book tokens went on this – a book about the author’s friendship with Muriel Spark. One of my favourite genres is books-about-unique-relationships-with-authors, and I love me some Spark.

I’m pretty pleased with my choices from January, and nearly all of them pass my “I really want this” test – I’m trying to buy fewer books in a just-in-case way. Which is a brilliant way to buy books, but not when you have about 1400 books you haven’t read. I might miss some gems this way, but I’ll also read some of the gems I have waiting for me.

 

 

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy weekend! I haven’t shared my most exciting new news yet, have I? Well, I have on my podcast and on all sorts of social media, but I might as well go whole hog for those who read this – I’ve got a cat! Hargreaves has lived with me for a week now. He’s very affectionate, and follows me around everywhere. He used to be a stray cat, so he’s probably enjoying a bit of love and warmth – the rescue centre guess he’s about six, and he’s lovely. And he’s sat on my legs as I type this.

In case you were wondering – yes, ‘Hargreaves’ is in honour of Miss Hargreaves, but also Roger Hargreaves, author of the Mr Men. And even the joy of having a cat won’t stop me sharing a book, a link, and a blog post…

1.) The link – is a fun article about Barbara Comyns by Nathan Scott McNamara. Be wary of spoilers, particularly about The Juniper Tree, But the article wins my love from the outset by connecting Comyns with one of my favourite films, Junebug.

2.) The blog post – is Jane’s Birthday Book of Underappreciated Lady Authors. Head on over there and she’ll explain.

3.) The book – is Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, which is about to be a Penguin Classic, in a new translation by Michael Hofmann. Apparently Döblin is a widely-revered German author, though I have to confess I hadn’t heard of him. It was originally published in 1929, which is totally my jam – I’m not sure when I’ll get to it (and it is LONG) but I thought I’d spread the word.

The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

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This beautiful Slightly Foxed edition has been on my shelf for a few years, and I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to read The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham (originally published in 2001, and a SF Edition in 2013). I do remember that I accidentally gave the SF team the wrong address for my review copy, very embarrassingly, and bought my own after my rather unpleasant ex-landlords never forwarded anything to the address I gave them. OH WELL. I finally picked it up, and wolfed it down in a few days.

If the name Ysenda Maxtone Graham rings a bell, it might be because her oral history of girls’ boarding schools – Terms and Conditions – was a bit of a hit a couple of years ago, and deservedly. What you might not know is that she is Jan Struther’s granddaughter, though she was born some years after Struther died. The family connection is the perfect rationale behind this insightful, slightly gossipy, and largely unscholarly examination of Jan Struther’s life and career.

When I say unscholarly, I mean there are none of the apparatus of your Hermione-Lee-style biography: no footnotes, no index, no appendices. No anecdote is referenced and, in much the same delightful way as Terms and Conditions, it feels more like a friend telling you everything they know on a topic, vague anecdotes and all, than a biographer carefully weighing the evidence. I mean it all as a compliment.

I suspect most of you know who Mrs Miniver is, even if you haven’t read the book or watched the film (and I recommend heartily that you do both). She was the British everywoman (well, upper-middle-class everywoman) whose tales of everyday events – going to the dentist; hosting a tea party – became a bestseller when collected from the newspaper into a handy edition. And she then became Greer Garson, noble British housewife facing war – and one very over-the-top angry Nazi in her kitchen – in the film that apparently helped persuade the American people to join WW2. Even though the initial book was published before war was declared.

And Jan Struther (real name Joyce Anstruther, later Joyce Maxtone Graham), of course, was the woman who created her.

Joyce went out of Printing House Square and walked along Upper Thames Street, thinking of all the ‘M’-words she could. Every one she thought of was either too long or too short, or a real name, or didn’t sound like a name at all. Then she noticed a man carrying a bundle of skins out of one of the furriers’ warehouses, and this set her thinking about the heraldic names for fur which her father had taught her. Vair and counter-vair, potent and counter-potent, ermine and erminois… and what was the other one? It was on the tip of her tongue for several minutes. Then she remembered it. She went straight back to Printing House Square.

“What about calling her ‘Mrs Miniver’?”

That’s a pretty good example of the sort way Maxtone Graham approaches the biography – the account doesn’t have any sort of referencing, and we are taken into Struther’s mind almost as though we were reading a novel. It does occasionally mean I wanted to take her anecdotes with a pinch of salt, but it made them nonetheless interesting to read.

Unlike most Slightly Foxed Editions, The Real Mrs Miniver isn’t a memoir – and it doesn’t focus on only part of the subject’s life. We see Struther from cradle to grave, though Maxtone Graham wisely focuses on the story surrounding Mrs Miniver and her various incarnations. The title is something of a misnomer because, despite being inextricably linked in the public consciousness, Struther was really very different from Miniver – not least in her marriage. Where the Minivers were the perfect couple, Struther’s marriage started off joyfully and became strained. The other focus of this biography is the dwindling marriage, and the love affair Struther started next with a younger refugee escaping the Nazis.

I found anything connected with Mrs Miniver fascinating – from the origins of the columns to the whirlwind surrounding the film (and the welcome way in which Greer Garson took on the mantle of ‘the real Mrs Miniver’). Struther lived in America for several years during the war, and reading about her publicity tours and radio appearances was so interesting. And, truth be told, Struther didn’t achieve much else, career-wise. We don’t hear much about her hymn-writing (‘Lord of all Hopefulness’ is still very familiar to many of us, I’m sure) but do see how she struggled to follow up on a success that was due to serendipity perhaps as much as purpose or even talent.

Maxtone Graham writes sensitively and rather movingly about Struther’s romantic strife, writing block, and a period of mental breakdown. The whole book is crafted brilliantly because Maxtone Graham is such a good storyteller – not adhering to the usual forms of biographies, but creating her own unique and inspired version. I’m glad I finally got around to reading it, and it’s made me want to dash back to Mrs Miniver – both book and film.

Tea or Books? #51: Author Parents vs Author Children, and The Boat by L.P. Hartley vs Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

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Literary families, and the reveal on our recommendations for each other – we’re back after a seasonal break. We’ve missed you!


 
In the first half of our 51st episode, we look at families where more than one generation has written, and try to determine whether we tend to prefer the parents or children – thank you Paul and Kirsty for your suggestion. And in the second half we find out whether or not our recommendations worked. We each picked a book we thought the other one would love – how well do we know each other’s tastes? I chose The Boat by L.P. Hartley for Rachel, and she chose Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner for me.

In the next episode we’ll be doing Penelope vs Penelope. All suggestions welcome (if you’ve sent one, it will doubtless happen eventually, once I dig it out from somewhere), and you can see our iTunes page here. If you can work out how to do reviews, via iTunes, they are always much appreciated!

The (enormous number of!) books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
Mr Men series by Roger Hargreaves
Things a Bright Girl Can Do by Sally Nicholls
Bluestockings by Jane Robinson
No Surrender by Constance Maud
The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther
Terms and Conditions by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
The Priory by Dorothy Whipple
Money by Martin Amis
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Faulks on Fiction by Sebastian Faulks
E.M. Delafield
The Unlucky Family by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (not The Unhappy Family!)
Provincial Daughter by R.M. Dashwood
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Trilby by George du Maurier
Only the Sister by Angela du Maurier
Virginia Woolf
Leslie Stephen
Anthony Trollope
Domestic Manners of the Americans by Frances Trollope
American Notes by Charles Dickens
A.A. Milne
Christopher Milne
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft
Angela Thirkell
Colin Macinnes
Denis Mackail
E.F. Benson
Stella Benson
Sitwells
Corduroy by Adrian Bell
Virginia Woolf by Quentin Bell
Bloomsbury by Quentin Bell
Angelica Garnett
Family Skeletons by Henrietta Garnett
Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson
Frieda Plath
Ted Hughes
Sylvia Plath
A.S. Byatt
Margaret Drabble
Margaret Forster
Ivy Compton-Burnett by Cecily Grieg
Appointment in Arezzo by Alan Taylor
Meyer
Bloomsbury’s Outsider by Sarah Knights
H.G. Wells and His Family by M.M. Meyer
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Alan Bennett
Two People by A.A. Milne
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
A Perfect Woman by L.P. Hartley
The Betrayal by L.P. Hartley
According to Mark by Penelope Lively
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
Penelope Mortimer

In The Mountains by Elizabeth von Arnim

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It was Elizabeth von Arnim Reading Week a week or two ago, organised by some nice people on Facebook, and I took In The Mountains (1920) off the shelf. One of the things I wanted to do this year was read more of the unusual or rare books I’ve got, because it seems a shame that the excitement of finding them shouldn’t get the opportunity to be matched by the reading experience. In the Mountains is one of the harder E von A titles to find in an early edition – though print-on-demand options are there – but I was lucky enough to stumble across a copy in a little bookshop in Dunster. It taught me always to check the pocket editions sections, as it won’t always be Thackeray and Austen.

In the Mountains was initially published anonymously – suggesting, perhaps, that it’s more autobiographical than she could allow under her own name. But any fan of von Arnim’s who came across this novel couldn’t possibly have mistaken it for the work of anybody else – it bears many of the hallmarks of her writing, from various different genres.

The mountains of the question are in Switzerland – the English narrator has returned there after a gap that encompasses the war. She comes with grief and weariness. We are never truly told what the grief is, but the first part of the novel (all of which is told in diary entries) tells how the landscape and the solitude are beginning to cure her. It isn’t quite the vision of natural panacea seen in The Enchanted April, but it is certainly of that ilk. And presumably it was largely inspired by von Arnim’s own Swiss mountain home.

I enjoyed all of this, but I will admit that one of my least favourite of von Arnim’s characteristic narratives is the nature-idyll-description. I still like it a lot, but there are other moulds in which I rather prefer her writing. And, in In the Mountains, she turns from one to the other – the comic outsider.

Mrs Barnes and Mrs Jewks arrive – they are English widows, exhausted by the heat and looking for a pension to stay. While our unnamed narrator isn’t hosting anybody officially, she has had enough of the curing solitude and quite welcomes the company. We see them through the prism of the diary entries, as the narrator gets to know them – or, at least, gets to know Mrs Barnes. She’s a conservative woman, horrified by anything too personal and constantly worrying that her impromptu stay is costing her hostess too much money. No protest assures her, and von Arnim writes amusingly about the hostess having to give up readily-available and much-liked treats to pacify her. Mrs Barnes’ strong (kind but immensely forceful) character gradually dominates the whole group. Her sister just smiles and complies, the only sign of a different character being the wry, amused looks she occasionally shoots the narrator.

All day to-day I have emptied myself of any wishes of my own and tried to be the perfect hostess. I have given myself up to Mrs. Barnes, and on the walk I followed where she led, and I made no suggestions when paths crossed though I have secret passionate preferences in paths, and I rested on the exact spot she chose in spite of knowing there was a much prettier one just round the corner, and I joined with her in admiring a view I didn’t really like. In fact I merged myself in Mrs. Barnes, sitting by her on the mountain side in much the spirit of Wordsworth, when he sat by his cottage fire without ambition, hope or aim.

This was my favourite section of the novel. It was really amusing, and von Arnim draws the characters really well – the anxieties of hosting people one doesn’t know well, the exasperation of coping with well-meaning pains, and the gradual development of friendship. Because Mrs Jewks brings one or two unexpected secrets with her…

The final act is a little forced, but von Arnim often sprinkles a bit of fairy dust into her conclusions and it’s forgivable because it’s enjoyable. This is the tenth novel I’ve read by von Arnim, and while it doesn’t hit the top spot – that honour still belongs to Christopher and Columbus – I thought it was a lovely, slim introduction to many of the things that make von Arnim charming, witty, and with an undercurrent of topical commentary that prevents the mixture being too sweet.

Others who got Stuck into it:

“It is a nice book but rather an odd mix” – The Captive Reader

“It’s a little compromised by its structure, by the sharp change part-way through, by the need to come to an end where there should be not an end but simply a change.” – Fleur in Her World

“I loved reading it, and it has put me in the mood for a lot more Elizabeth Von Arnim” – HeavenAli

My own Bob

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After reading Pamela Paul’s My Life With Bob, I realised that I needed to do something about my lists of books. As I mentioned in my review, I’ve kept a list of the books I’ve read since 2002 – well, I wrote down a few in 2001 too, but I only started putting the date down properly in 2002. And I’ve always kept that list in the back of that year’s diary. (And, well, put the list into another notebook arranged alphabetically by author.)

But two places isn’t enough! Paul’s book convinced me that I needed to have them all in order, all in one place. I can’t go digging around the back of a cupboard for my old diaries when I want to see what I was reading ten years ago. Step forward this notebook, which my friend Lorna got me, with its lovely Tove Jansson illustrated cover.

 

Why yes, dear technophile, I could have made a spreadsheet on my computer. It would have been a lot easier to search it. But I know that this notebook can survive for many decades, whereas who knows whether or not computers will cope with Excel in 2035.

So… I spent quite a lot of evenings writing up my list. It’s a great way of making yourself feel like you have to watch some more television – or, rather, listen to it.

I picked this page at random, not just to show off that I’ve read Ulysses, promise. Apparently in 2005 I was reading a bunch of books for my undergraduate degree, and… The Naughtiest Girl is a Monitor. An ‘x’ in the first column means that it was a reread.

And how many books have I read since the beginning of 2002? Well, accurate as of today, 1722 books. It did take up rather more of the notebook than I was expecting, but I can turn it upside down and reuse the other side, so I think this should see me through at least another twenty years.

A few reads I missed from 2017

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As I’ve turned to 2018’s A Century of Books, I thought I should tidy up some of the books I finished in December – a clean house, and all that. I read an unusually high (for me) number in December – eleven – and wrote or podcasted about quite a few of them. But here are the five I missed…

Men and Wives (1931) by Ivy Compton-Burnett

I made my book group read Ivy Compton-Burnett! The truth about her reception will come out on Wednesday… I’m assuming it’ll be largely negative, but hopefully it might spark off something in at least one future ICB addict. Here’s the rub, though. I chose one I hadn’t read, because I wanted to read more, and Men and Wives is definitely the worst ICB I’ve read yet. The sprawling cast and curious moral questions are there (this time with a murder/suicide plot woven through it), but it’s much less funny and not quirky enough to seem deliberately heightened, in the way she usually is.

Their Brilliant Careers (2016) by Ryan O’Neill

I read a new novel! Well, new-ish – it was published in Australia in 2016, and is going to be published in the UK this year. I got a review copy after Scott Pack (the publisher) offered them on Twitter, saying how brilliant it was. It takes the form of 16 biographies of famed Australian novelists, none of which really exist. I’ll be honest, I didn’t know what the point of it was. All the reviews say it’s hilarious, but I could only manage the occasional smile. But I suspect the fault is with me – too experimental for me to cope with, I think.

Mystery in White (1937) by J Jefferson Farjeon

I finally read the British Library Crime Classics book that was their first big success, and launched their beautiful books into thousands of homes. It has a brilliant set up – people leaving a train caught in the snow come across a house that has been recently abandoned. The unfolding plot doesn’t really live up to the premise, but it was a very entertaining Christmas read nonetheless.

Identically Different (2013) by Tim Spector

My friend lent me this book, which is all about genes and epigenetics, using case studies of twins to explain many different cases of what genes do and don’t do. It boils down to ‘epigenetics mean that two people with the same genes won’t inevitably have the same [insert condition/predisposition/etc here]’, but it was really interesting to read.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens

Martin Jarvis read this to me, in audiobook form, and it accompanied me on many commutes. He did a great job at bringing out all the characters, and – though I definitely preferred the English scenes to the French ones – the book would be worth it for the exchange between Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher alone, which was Dickens at his most hilarious.

To translate or not to translate?

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I was chatting to a friend about Les Miserables by Victor Hugo – which, I should add, I haven’t read – and it got me wondering about titles and translations. Most novels published into English have their titles translated too – sometimes differently in different translations (have you read The Outsider by Albert Camus or The Stranger by Albert Camus? Closely Observed Trains by Bohumil Hrabal or Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal?) But usually they find their way into English.

But not Les Miserables. Is that just because it doesn’t translate easily? But what about – and this is the only other example I could think of off the top of my head – Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan? That could easily be Goodbye Sadness [I meant to write Hello, but see comments on this!], though maybe it’s missing something that’s in the original; my French is far, far away from idiomatic levels, so somebody else would have to tell me.

At least one of you is thinking right now about Proust and A la recherche du temps perdu, I guarantee it. That’s been translated as Remembrance of Things Past and In Search of Lost Time – and is still known as the French title, of course. ‘Remembrance of things past’ is from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, and I had heard a story that the equivalent line, in the French translation of Sonnet 30, was ‘a la recherche du temps perdu’… but, sadly, the internet has no evidence for that. There goes a fun anecdote.

Can you think of other books which kept their non-English title when translated into English? Or maybe the polymaths among you can tell me whether or not English novels often keep their titles when they are translated.

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Am I getting my first cold of 2018? Quite possibly. I only had two last year, and that is nigh-on miraculous for me, since I’m usually just counting the days between them. But whether or not I’m a picture of health (let’s face it – at the best of times, I’m not), here is a book, a link, and a blog post. Happy weekend!

1.) The blog post – I love, love, love Best Books of the Year blog posts. Don’t we all? I could link to any number of them, but here is the post from Juliana at The Blank Garden. I’ve chosen it because I also love book stats, and Juliana doesn’t skimp on those.

2.) The link – my friend Lorna sent a Guardian article to me, all about literature courses in Australia and how unprepared students are. It’s interesting, in that the author has (to my mind) lots of good points, but also demands that people read and act in a way she believes to be right. There’s a lot going on. It’s an interesting read.

3.) The book – I’ve bought it! Because I can buy books again, without restraint! (And, in fact, I had a book token I hadn’t used.) It’s Appointment in Arezzo by Alan Taylor, and falls into one of my very favourite categories of literature: memoirs about authors by people with a unique perspective. Taylor started by interviewing Muriel Spark, then became her friend, and this slim book tells the tale of it all.

 

First and Last by V.L. Whitechurch

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Guys, I don’t know if you realise, but I’m hilarious. And that’s why I decided the last book of 2017 and first book of 2018 would be… First and Last (1929) by V.L. Whitechurch. Well, at least I amuse myself.

This is my second novel by Whitechurch – the first was the very amusing Canon in Residence – and I picked it up in a bookshop in Stratford-on-Avon a few years ago, when I was (happily enough) hunting for more books by him. He is one of the few vicar-authors, indeed canon-authors, and the title of his novel is a reference to the Bible: ‘so the last will be first and the first will be last’. Jesus actually says it twice in the Bible and, in scriptural context, I think it’s mostly about how the poor are not excluded from Heaven, and nor are those who find faith late in life.

The novel isn’t really about either of those things.

It is about what happens when somebody from a poor background – young Tom the fisherman – comes into vast fortune, through a combination of luck and ability. He saves a rich man who gets caught in sailing difficulties and, in turn, is offered an education far beyond the means of his family and his class (particularly given that this section is set in 1881). The other character we follow is Alan, the stepson of the vicar, who has to leave the vicarage when his stepfather dies – most of the inheritance goes elsewhere, and his future looks much poorer than he realised.

Such is the set up of the characters and their fates (and an ill-advised dose of dialect from local fisherman alongside). The novel skips forward forty years, where Tom is Sir Thomas, a rich businessman (and war profiteer) whose fortune is partly ill-gotten; Alan is a clergyman with a very small income, widowed and not very happy with his life. Tom has a son; Alan has a daughter. You can probably guess what happens when they re-emerge in each other’s lives… but it all happens charmingly and interestingly. Whitechurch is a great storyteller.

I didn’t mark down any passages to quote, so here’s a bit I’ve picked more or less at random, to give a sense of his prose:

The Reverend Alan Crawford, Vicar of Lingmarsh, was tired – tired in body and in mind. He had been paying a round of parochial visits in his widely scattered country parish, trudging along lanes thick with mud, taking ‘short cuts’ over fields to outlying cottages, all the afternoon.

Altogether he had paid seven calls, and each visit, with, perhaps the exception of one, had added to his sense of weariness – a weariness that had come over him before ever he fared forth on his parochial round.

I really enjoyed reading First and Last, and I think any fan of middlebrow novels from the interwar period will love the characters, pace, and comfort of the novel. What prevents it being a brilliant novel, to my mind, is partly the lack of humour (did I imagine it in Canon in Residence, which I recall being tantamount to farce?) and partly the ways in which the characters lean to stereotype. The good people are a little too good; the wicked a little too wicked. First and Last isn’t at all moralistic (in the negative sense), but it does follow firmly trodden moral paths – and, as a parable is unlikely to show thorough nuance in its participants, so First and Last does paint a little in black and white.

But, given these limitations, I think it’s a delightful and absorbing book – not great literature, but certainly a great read. And a great way to kick off 2018 and A Century of Books.