Barchester Towers is an 1857 novel by Anthony Trollope. It tells the story of a power struggle among the clergy of fictional Barchester following the death of a popular and long serving bishop.

One of the most engaging things about the book is the friendly, mischievous, sometimes indulgent, sometimes exasperated, voice telling the story. Initially we seem to be in the hands of an omniscient narrator from an age when people readily believed in a higher power directing human affairs. But sometimes this voice comes down to Earth, as we find our author sitting in the pews of Barchester Cathedral along with the other characters in the book.

And, fittingly, this omniscient, yet human, narrator, tells a story about the contradictions of power. We meet a bishop who seems powerful, while actual authority lies with his formidable wife, and a unpleasantly ambitious junior Church official intent on rising through the ranks. Some characters decide not to play the silly game of climbing the greasy pole, only to find themselves unaccountably ascending to senior positions. Others who yearn for power are denied it. And yet I was left wondering what is really achieved or denied, when authority remains such a shifting concept. This was a fascinating exploration, especially in a book from 1857.

I enjoyed Barchester Towers – moving, funny and insightful. Yes, there are occasional long passages of biographical background, which might have been best left in the author’s notes. But this author does not set himself up as perfect, and I could not help forgiving the bits and pieces that maybe could have done with the guiding hand of an editor. Do editors have the real power in the writing world? That might be a good point to end on.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is a young adult novel by Judy Blume, published in 1970. It has since received many awards, and appears on the Time Magazine list of best novels since 1923. In the United States it has also featured prominently on lists of books that have been ‘challenged’ which is the term that the American Library Association uses when people make a complaint about a book and ask for it to be taken off library shelves.

So, I had a look, and found a charming, funny novel about eleven year old Margaret Simon who worries that she will never get her period, never develop breasts and will be some kind of freak for the rest of her life. She also frequently talks to God, but struggles to work out which religion she should be identifying with.

I suppose the book does cover familiar young-adult ground in exploring themes of belonging and identity, but it does so in a way that really takes things up a notch, notably through the frequent chats with God. Strangely these passages reminded me of the film Gravity, where stranded astronauts talk to “Houston in the blind’, a term used to refer to radio communications, where astronauts cannot hear Houston, but continue to send messages just in case Houston is receiving. In Gravity there is much interesting enigma about these messages. Do they get through to Houston? Are they similar to prayer where no one seems to be listening? Even if no one listens, do the messages sent to Houston offer comfort and reassurance in themselves, even if no reassurance seems to be literally forthcoming? Is the fact that the audience hears these messages significant?

Margaret’s one-sided God chats have a similar enigmatic quality. They are comforting in themselves even though no apparent reply comes back. And although the blessings Margaret asks for fail to be granted, this turns out to be no bad thing. Big breasts for example. Margaret envies a girl in her class who has been granted such a gift, only to discover, after talking to this apparently fortunate girl, that maybe a blessing can also be a curse. Maybe Margaret’s prayers are answered in the lack of any response.

You see? This is a book that gets you thinking in broad terms, about more than just fitting in with your friends at school.

These are the themes that have had people in America queuing up to demand the book be taken out of libraries. America is a strange country, seeing itself as free-thinking, but actually fundamentalist in many ways. A good novel will show and not tell. There is a constituency in America that prefers the illusory certainty of telling and being told. Showing is always going to be more nuanced than telling, tending to pose questions rather than apparently giving answers.

Flesh by David Szalay won the 2025 Booker Prize.

This book is apparently very understated. No fancy narrative tricks. No poetic turns of phrase. The central character, István, is a taciturn Hungarian, who we follow from boyhood to old age through the ups and downs of his life. By any objective assessment there are some real highs and terrible lows. And yet, there’s a uniform coolness that accompanies it all.

What was life like in the Hungarian army during the Gulf War?

“It was okay.”

“Is it nice living in a mansion when things look up?”

“Sure.”

The same tone answering questions about post traumatic stress from a therapist as that used answering questions about a day at the office.

It somehow makes the emotion burbling below the surface more powerful, and also gives relief from emotional extremes. I would say this was a British approach, but it seems the Hungarians are potentially more British than the British, which is maybe why István feels vaguely at home in both countries – not too at home, nothing too extreme, no marching with flags. Ah, for that kind of Britishness, or Hungarianess.

When I read Anthony Powell, I felt his books provided excitement for those who felt life was mundane, while at the same time conferring peaceful reassurance on those going through dramatic times. This book manages the same trick. There is no preaching. Take what you need, leave what you don’t.

I really enjoyed it.

Love Triangle is a book by Matt Parker about the history and maths of triangles – mostly the maths.

Never finding maths easy, I’m one of ‘the masses’ to whom Matt says he wants to bring maths. I became interested in triangles not because of Pythagoras, but through planning a novel about a love triangle.

There is no sense of this kind of painful three-sided relationship in Love Triangle. We are mostly in the world of mathematical abstraction, via hot air balloons scaring pigs, and United States presidents revealing secrets about spy satellites by putting classified imagery on social media. There’s one section about art where things started to get interesting, only for the narrative to head off into an odd digression about UK road signs for a stadium, which show a football with mathematically inaccurate hexagons. The author was so exercised about this that he complained to the government. From my non-mathematical perspective I wondered why stop with hexagons? The picture on the sign is two dimensional, when an actual football is three dimensional. And does the picture match the regulation ball size as defined by the FA? Why not just stick an actual football on the sign for maximum precision? I recall an anecdote about Picasso, where someone was giving the artist a hard time about the surrealist portrayal of women in his paintings, producing a picture of his girlfriend as evidence of how they should appear. “And is she really rather small and flat?” Picasso is supposed to have asked looking at the photo.

This book is interesting. The fact that it was hard to follow was no doubt my fault as I’ve always struggled with numbers. But beyond that, I found it kind of… claustrophobic. That might be the word, even when the subject under discussion can be used to measure stellar distances. I would humbly suggest that although Picasso and I have nothing in common, there were moments of sympathy with him in being told to see reality in very particular terms, when other terms were available. No doubt Love Triangle on occasion brings precision to a lazy popular outlook. At other times it felt like it was leading me on an obsessive wander down a dark, cramped, hexagonal alley.

This journey through the history of ancient art is not straight forward. Very little of the art remains, researchers make mistakes and disagree with each other, and the development of art seems to ebb and flow, appearing, disappearing before returning again. Also I found it a little difficult to orientate myself amongst references to dating, sometimes using numbers of years ago, mostly using names of historical periods – early, middle, late Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Mousterian, Aurignacian, and so on – lots of looking things up there.

But reading on, a feeling did emerge of people first noticing interesting details about their world, curious shapes in rocks, or scratch marks on cave walls, and then working to tweak them. For example, some enterprising early artist noticed a patch of bear scratch marks on a wall, and then inscribed the outline of a mammoth around them, the scratches becoming the mammoth’s shaggy coat.

And in creating stone tools, their makers seemed to look at the stone they were using, and wonder if some modifications could be made in the interests of beauty. They’d make tools out of rock that was attractive but perhaps more difficult to work than plain, ordinary rock. They would either buy in, or travel to find exotic material. Or maybe they’d make a tool from a rock featuring a fossil. So art began to emerge from pre-existing natural forms, and from the practical business of living.

The first widely used paint was derived from an iron rich clay called ochre. When heated, powdered and combined with water, the resulting red pigment, was used to create images, probably as body paint, and as a nutritional supplement, being rich in iron. Or you might think of it as a very early form of ink, and the pictures created with it as an ancient writing.

This quote from researcher Leroi-Gourhan:

‘At its start, figurative art was directly linked to language, and much closer to writing in the broadest sense than to a work of art; it is a symbolic transposition and not a copy of reality.

So not only is this book about early art, it’s also about the earliest stages of the writing you are reading now.

The First Artists is an interesting book, a bit confusing maybe, which is an expression of the complicated story it tells as much as anything else. Overall, however, I gained a feeling of art not as something that people did in their spare time when more basic needs were met, but as an activity firmly rooted in nature and practicality.

Riddley Walker published in 1980, is set in post-apocalypse east Kent, close to where I live in pre-apocalypse mid-Kent. Society has fallen apart. Modern knowledge has been lost. Language is a debased version of English. Very few people can read or write.

The world destroyed in the war was one divided by maths, clocks, written words, and countless different books. Now there seems to be only one book, The Eusa Story, a kind of religious text setting out a garbled account of what happened to the world when it fell apart. There is a feeling that division led to disaster, the splitting of the atom as the final and most disastrous manifestation of this desire to divide.

But disaster could also be blamed on giving up on messy variety and trying to find one final answer, fighting one final war to end them all, the 1 Big 1 as the Walker language terms it. Much of the plot is driven by a search for various ingredients necessary for the recreation of gunpowder. Elements of the recipe are separate, but we all know what happens when they are combined.

So trouble comes from both breaking things up and trying too hard to force them together.

The language reflects this paradox. Compound words in 1980 English are characteristically broken up in Riddley language. (See the article Dialect, Grapholect and Story by D.P. Mullen of DePauw University). ‘Record’ becomes ‘red cord’, ‘opposite’ becomes ‘arper sit’, for example. But the Riddley language also makes new compounds out of words that 1980s English divides, like ‘musve’ for ‘must have’, ‘iwdve‘ for ‘I would have’.

Creation and destruction, things coming together and falling apart seem to go in cycles, and are part of each other.

Riddley Walker is a thought provoking, philosophical book, at times much funnier than you would expect. The section where people of the future try to get their heads around a preserved example of 1980’s English, had your reviewer chuckling. It is fairly hard work to read, and I couldn’t decide if all the many ideas really gelled – language, intuition versus rationality, gunpowder, Punch and Judy shows, particle accelerators, dogs, ring symbolism, religion, politics, spirituality. But in other ways this book is a rare coming together of what is said and how it’s said. The language is not something you look through to the story, it’s part of the story. And from that point of view the book really felt like a remarkable and complete piece of writing.

The Lowlife is a 1963 novel by Alexander Baron, reissued in May of 2025 by Faber. It’s described as a cult classic. I don’t quite know what one of those is. Maybe it’s a book considered very good, but through bad luck doesn’t get the readership it deserves.

As chance would have it, The Lowlife is very much about luck. Harryboy Boas, an East End Jack-the-lad, now in his forties, makes a living with occasional stints of rag-trade employment, only designed to support his true passions of gambling and reading. He’s an essentially decent chap, who tends to put a positive spin on his life, to the extent of inventing a property empire with which to impress a young couple who move into his apartment building in Hackney.

The couple, Evelyn and Vic, are the opposite, finding themselves in a fascinating, colourful, energetic place, full of varied, friendly people, made wholly negative by Evelyn’s snobbery and Vic’s defeatist approach to life.

Reading the book I began to wonder about luck. In some ways, it’s a clear cut case. The dog on which you have placed your bet either wins or loses, magnifying or disappearing your money in the process. On the other hand, what is winning anyway? Is it being in business where you work all the time? Is it Evelyn’s dream of a smart house in a neighbourhood where there are no blue collar workers around to bring down the tone? Or is it Harry’s plan, which involves making a big win on the dogs, and using this to fund a blissful few weeks in his Hackney flat, reading a recently purchased set of the complete works of Emile Zola? As a reader that last option sounded the most appealing.

Without giving too much away, a run of bad luck leads to a dramatic denouement, out of which you could say there’s an ending that is happy or sad, or both.

Honestly if you think you are not doing well, there is reassurance to be had here.

I really enjoyed The Lowlife. It’s written in an attractive, accessible style, compelling in its story-line, fascinating on the subjects of fate and luck.

A cult classic, which I thoroughly recommend. I’m lucky to have come across it.

The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes is a 2019 history of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century period in France, known as the Belle Epoch. It features a huge cast of characters, all arranged around the figure of Samuel Pozzi, an eminent and pioneering French surgeon and gynaecologist, who on a visit to London with two aristocratic friends gets his portrait painted in a red coat by John Singer Sergeant. Pozzi is an ideal central point for this account. Everyone, whether they are famous or obscure, rich or poor will eventually get sick and need a doctor.

And just as Pozzi meets a lot of different people, he also personifies contrasting aspects of society within himself. He is a very good doctor, with a celebrity clientele. At the same time he is democratic in his outlook, believing that good health care should be for everyone. He has a high regard for women, insisting on care and consideration in their medical treatment, declaring that ‘chauvinism is one of the forms of ignorance’. Yet his view of marriage runs along old aristocratic lines, as in a wife for stability and family, other women for the more fun aspects of relationships. And beneath gathering nationalist storm clouds that would end the Belle Epoque with a terrible war, Pozzi stands out as a cosmopolitan internationalist, seeking the expertise of specialists from all over the world, and treating people with the same humane openness – a lesson for us there.

Julian Barnes does a great job of taking all the contradictions in Pozzi’s personal and wider worlds and concentrating them in Singer Sergeant’s painting of the enigmatic doctor, wearing an oddly unclassifiable red garment, maybe relaxed dressing gown, maybe oddly formal, expensive coat.

I’d like a coat like that.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel about a mysterious portrait of a young man, where the painted figure ages, while the youth himself lives on unblemished.

I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray at school. Now on this re-read I’ve somehow reached my sixties. Inevitably there have been changes in your reviewer. It’s difficult to remember what I thought about the book as a teen. Maybe it was a matter of taking youth for granted. Now, having to be mindful of pulling a muscle while stretching in the mornings, the issues explored in The Picture of Dorian Gray seem more pertinent.

We start out with the straight-forward idea that the passage of time is a journey taking us from a golden age towards a fallen state. Dorian begins the book young and beautiful, feeling that time will only dull his charms. Meanwhile in society at large, there’s a sense that after living through long centuries when they knew what was what, people are entering a darker and more uncertain era. Religion is not the force it was, slipping away along with the moral code it once supported, replaced by the cynicism of Lord Henry, and of Dorian himself who blithely makes his selfish way through life without consequence.

But in a sort of equal and opposite reaction, there are aspects of the book that portray the past as a backward time out of which we are slowly emerging. Take the character of Lord Fermor, for example, a retired diplomat who grumbles that these days one has to sit vulgar examinations to be accepted into the diplomatic service, rather than relying on the tried and tested method of noble birth and smart-set contacts. It’s hard not to see progress rather than deterioration in moving on from the heyday of a dinosaur like Lord Fermor.

“Whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us,” says Fermor’s nephew, Lord Henry.

In the end, there is no real sense of youth’s passing as an irrevocable loss. The book grows away from decay, towards development. Dorian eventually comes to see his gilded youth as “a green, an unripe time”. Now maybe we feel that the secret of staying young is to allow ourselves to grow older, to change, to move into new phases of life. Youth, after all, is about the new, not the old.

I’m glad I re-read The Picture of Dorian Gray at this point in my life.

So, Ulysses by James Joyce. The best novel ever according to many of the authorities who compile lists of best novels. I had to read this book at some point. But it was an intimidating prospect, maybe requiring me to know Greek, Latin, French, German and endless literary references. No wonder I have left it until my 60s.

These are some of the notes I jotted down as I went along.

We start at breakfast on an ordinary day in Dublin in the summer of 1904. Young men share digs in a former military tower by the harbour in Dublin. Much religious imagery is mixed with mundane morning routine. There is a reference to changing of water into wine, but in this case, water changes into tea via an anecdote about an old woman who likes her tea strong, because she likes water to be water and tea to be tea, even if tea is still almost entirely water.

The conventions of academia and fancy literature come in for the same treatment – revealed in many ways to be tea, which is actually still plain water in disguise. Maybe there was nothing here for me to feel intimidated by.

Ulysses combines the intellectual and the everyday. It’s a book respected in academic circles, but maybe best read by skimming along and not worrying too much. When the going gets tough I suggest reading out loud in an Irish accent, just for fun.

In chapter 15, the central character Leopold Bloom muses on his failings, cooking up self-lacerating fantasies of condemnation and trial by jury. He then goes to the other extreme and imagines himself as a great and wise leader loved by all. But as he hands out gifts and gives freedom to his people, he accidentally introduces “a free fox in a free hen roost”. Then things turn around and Bloom is hated again. Meanwhile, outside his fantasies, back in normal life, he continues to live between extremes, neither particularly loved nor violently hated, not brilliant or useless, just an average chap on an ordinary day in Dublin.

There’s a wonderful scene towards the end of the novel where Bloom turns on a tap to fill a kettle with water. And then we go on the incredible journey which water has taken to reach that tap. Tea might remain water, but water is an amazing thing.

So I drank tea while reading Ulysses, a book I found a funny, ethereal, sometimes distasteful, often confusing, frequently compelling, brew.