Iain Pears is a risk-taking novelist. He does not repeat himself. This is no way to build a career or to acquire a loyal readership. Actually this statement must be qualified, for Pears is also the author of half-a-dozen agreeable soft-crime detective novels, featuring the art historian Jonathan Argyll, and these are all of a piece. If you have liked one, you will like them all. (I do.) But Pears has also written An Instance of the Fingerpost, described by at least one reviewer as a cross between Agatha Christie and Umberto Eco, and also an extraordinary novel, The Dream of Scipio, set in Provence in the three periods of history: the end of the Roman Empire, the years of the Papal residence at Avignon, and the second world war. I found it wonderfully compelling, and couldn’t understand why it failed to make the Booker shortlist.

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