Described as a short history of Private Life, in fact it is a bit longer than that. A full length history of his own Rectory home in Norfolk, it delves into the history of so much that we take for granted. Dining, sleeping, eating, crapping: each function of humanity has had its evolution from our animal state. So a fascinating view of our homes, interspersed with excellent tales of the man who built the Crystal Palace, Jefferson’s lifelong attempt to build Montecito and many other fascinating stories.

John Banville isn’t only a good novelist, he is two good novelists. Here is another highly readable (the fifth) in his Quirke Dublin series. A mystery. And a mystery how he finds the time to write these books as well as his more enduring ones.

A damned beautiful novel. About him and Zelda, the falling in love, the drifting apart, the drinks, the lack of purpose. Very fine. His writing seems to look even better with distance. Here he has written the falling out of love, which is so hard to write. Now my second favourite Fitzgerald. The detail of his prose is fascinating and wonderful.

Again I’m disappointed, and yet I love him. His book starts with ridiculing female reactions to his books but within a few chapters you are feeling sympathetic to their views. Must he go on and on about the death of the novel when he himself is killing it? There are many hard truths about the failure of the novel and the futility of the Northern writer moving to London and then writing about the decline of the novel. But he keeps saying he has nothing to say but says it anyway. Irony? Of course. Wearying? Eventually. If you keep destroying our faith in what you are doing we may be tempted to take you at your word. He is one of our funniest writers. His essays are sublime. Is this all that is left after you have been Prized, praised and rewarded. Come on Howard. Bet you’re a Man City supporter.

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.

This is very pale stuff, collected journalism really, the sort of thing agents suggest to publishers. Not for me.

Fine short essays from the masters of history. Particularly good short essays reflecting various subjects and aspects of history. The two I most enjoyed were Government and History, and War and History. Excellent stuff.

I have been dipping, but it’s a short swim. Sometimes poems that are easy to read are easy to write too. I miss any kind of depth or insight, the sudden intake of breath you get when reading, for example Larkin, or Emily Dickinson, when a great truth is suddenly made apparent, which is one of the great delights of poetry.

I began to read the new Wolf Hall on the I-Pad a holiday cruise, but it really didn’t grab me, rather like the old one. I'll give it another go, but I rarely am seduced by historical fiction, perhaps because I find real history so fascinating, for example I’m currently reading Alison Weir’s “The Lady in The Tower” which covers the same period, and the same man (Thomas Cromwell) but which is so much more fun.

I loved it and thought it a terrific read, a particularly great holiday read, or Vacation, as you Yanks call them, probably because you take so few. From the brilliant opening line of the Prologue, the whole novel unfurls superbly…“Everyone knows that when a certain kind of single American female on a Mexican holiday drinks too much tequila she will get a tattoo.” A single woman and her married lover, a brief affair, sets up the future conflict which turns nicely deadly. Chapter One opens just as brilliantly. “In the desert the sun is an anarchist. Molecules madly dance beneath the relentless glare. Unity gives way to chaos. And every day, people lose their minds.” This man can write. We are in Palm Springs, California. But I won’t spoil it. Read it and enjoy.

In Henley at Jonkers, a very lovely Antiquarian bookshop in the High Street, just opposite the grave of Dusty Springfield, I picked up an old paperback edition of this David Hughes book. I knew him a little in Provence in the old days with my novelist friend Earl Thompson and I enjoyed his novels (The Pork Butcher.) He was married to Mai Zetterling for nineteen years, and I may also have met him through Gerald Durrell with whom we socialized a little in the early seventies. In fact he wrote a memoir of Gerry which I have ordered through Alibris. He was our host when Python filmed one of the later Flying Circus series in Jersey, where he had a spectacular zoo and where we adopted a spectacled bear. I found the book itself engaging, and then less so.

Do you have those books that you always pick up and start to read and then go, hang on I already read that. That’s why I keep a reading list. But some, like this one, I remember that I bailed about the same time as I just did again. Nothing particularly wrong. Just ungrabbed I guess. Think it might have been a Mister B’s which I picked up last year, and then picked up again this year! Well if I did I obviously didn’t enter it, sometimes I don’t if I don’t get very far. Sorry B keepers.

Essays. With a pang I noticed that he was still alive and writing this, this time last year. Of course the great thing about writers is that they stay alive as long as there are readers…I was intrigued by his essay on Lolita, in a review of Reading Lolita in Tehran, in which he rates it even higher than I do, and discusses it finely, and compatibly with my own views…

I’ve also lost my notes on this brilliant book about the scoundrel Rupert Murdoch’s empire and his cynical and self-important manipulation of the British Press, Police and Politicians. The book is an eye opener, revealing just how sinister and deeply corrupting the whole phone tapping thing became. The News of the World with their God given right to hound and bully people, was always a nasty rag: in the Fifties exposing sex amongst the middle classes and the endless naughty vicars who in those more innocent days had sex only with young women. Of course they hounded gays, but they were asking for it weren’t they? Often they hounded people to death. Early on they discovered just how cheap it is to bribe policemen, Detective ranks particularly, and in the Sixties they happily collaborated with the Metropolitan Police busting pop stars for possessing grass and helping to plant drug evidence to ensure conviction for The Stones and some Beatles. With the coming of Murdoch the scene changed. Suddenly he had five newspapers and they could change Governments. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” in the famous phrase of Baron Acton¸ but I prefer the finer quote from Stanley Baldwin attacking Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere (themselves the leading press barons of his day) in a phrase suggested by his cousin Rudyard Kipling: “What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.” During the Seventies there were legendary tales of fearless News of the World reporters sexually entrapping celebs and politicians in pubs and clubs and hotel rooms. I once watched two young ladies making out in the Gents at a London club, attempting to seduce a famous footballer friend of mine, who shall remain blameless, as he rolled his eyes and mentioned the name of the Publicist (Max Clifford) who was paying these girls to entrap anyone who wandered in for a quiet piss. How English is all this? Hypocritical. Devious. Yes, very English. The pursuit of unhappiness seems to be the watchword of the British Press, who are even more depressing than the English weather. Read this book and be very very concerned that the man who owns Fox News did this.

I’m sure I wrote something about my experience of reading this book in early summer, about my excitement, my anticipation, and my disappointment that this was not as good as other Cheevers, nor approaching the maturity of Bullet Park, and about my continually returning to pick up the tale, but if I did I cannot find the words, and must have recourse to Dave Eggers charming introduction. Of course Eggers would love Cheever, as I believe does Michael Chabon, but then who does not, who could not? (Probably a lot of clod hopping best sellers) So you must excuse me, that I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this tale, a sequel in the sense of recurring characters, and that I have lost my notes where I’m sure I made many sensible and cogent observations, only to leave you with this pale wreath of memory.

Most books end badly. I don’t mean their events, I mean their writing. It requires a great deal of stamina to finish a book, and many authors fall off towards the end. I found this as true of Mansfield Park as this book. (Perhaps this thought comes from Aspects of the Novel by E.M Forster?) I think pervasive use of editors by Americans writers helps prevent it more than their English equivalents. This is a mostly very interesting book about the first two Georges, their courts, their wives and their mistresses, with some delightful tales, and quite a bit of tattle.

Imagine the worst person in the world. Martin Amis has written him. A nightmare character with no redeeming features. A man so vile you have to read his exploits behind your hands, as you avert your eyes from the worst violence in movies. Then Amis plays the gag. He gives him all the money in the world. While inside prison he wins the lottery and becomes intensely rich. This is indubitably funny. He gives Asbo a budding young intellectual nephew for a companion and surrogate son, stirs and it becomes an explosive brew. Not pleasant, but decidedly funny. Not so much Lucky Jim as Lucky Bastard. He has portrayed the worst sociopath since Stalin. This man is a Borderline and has no feelings for anyone at all. Of course in the end he is betrayed by his utter lack of feeling, “who let the dog’s in?” In his unspeakable cruelty to Marlon, his envious attempt to hurt the innocents who have found love and form a family reminded me of Dickens long before I realised Martin Amis was well ahead of me with his Carkery Lane and Speers Central. But why do the British press hate him so? Well partly because he subtitles this “State of England” and also perhaps because this portrait of an exploiter with no feelings is actually an intimate view of the Press itself, snarling with impotent rage. I am glad he has successfully escaped the country. It seems the only sensible way to avoid the Rottweiler’s of Wapping. They savage his work apparently, though it’s hard for me to believe that. They even savage his dentistry. They eat their young. Must it become a land fit only for the mediocre?

Great opening chapters state his theme, the growth of consciousness of the real, and our perception of the Universe and how we are growing smaller and smaller as our knowledge expands beyond the stars and the galaxies to the very nature of the Universe itself. Nice to be reading under the whirling summer Milky Way with the lyrics of the Galaxy Song on my mind, and my lovely task to provide new lyrics for Professor Brian Cox, a sequel to the original song, including the immense dimensions of the whole unlikely exploding thing in which we find ourselves. In 1981, when I began to write that song, the astronomical distances and speeds mentioned in the lyrics were all considered scientifically accurate, now, of course, we have had thirty years of expanding scientific research and observation and I have had to alter the words to correspond with our new estimate of the extreme distances in the Galaxy and our ever expanding Universe, not to mention the possibility of a multi-verse, not a day goes by without us getting smaller and smaller. So far from the medieval picture of us as at the centre of the heavens, with everything revolving around our fixed planet, we now find ourselves thrust ever farther from the enormity of the Universe, and now we know we are only at the extreme edge of a thing so immense that it is almost impossible to conceive. Here are some new “facts” that I pulled out of David Eagelman’s book about the brain: There are 500 million Galaxy groups, 10 billion large Galaxies, 100 billion dwarf Galaxies, 2,000 billion billion suns. The visible Universe is 15 billion light years across and may itself be just a small speck in the total Universe…think of that on your way to the mall, and, of course, I bet you anything in thirty years you will have to update all these figures…although I alas will have to leave that task to you.

I was gob smacked by this. The extraordinarily confident prose, such maturity of thought and expression in one so young completely took me by surprise. I know precisely where it left me though. The simple tale took a sudden left turn into a narrative by someone else, with the story of the unkillable man, and I felt the whole air go out of the book. I persisted, but so did she, so though I intend to return and see what happens after that seismic shift, I have been in no hurry to do so.

The Story of America’s most Secretive Religion. Downloaded. This is a less than interesting tale. If anything an illustration of how easily mankind is misled, or the prevailing appeal of fascism. If a minor con man and bullshit artist like L. Ron Hubbard can get anyway with starting a religion so evidently stupid as Scientology one wonders what hope there is for mankind. But then of course all religions require the willing consent of the deceived. I personally believe in the separation of Church and planet. That these con men should be entitled to tax relief is shameful. The paranoid who are everywhere, are at the mercy of manipulatory idiots like this. It’s a Miscavidge of Justice. A Cruise missal.