D. J. Taylor

The tiny independent firm of London Books, founded last year, specialises in reprints of hard-boiled thrillers from the interwar years. Two I particularly enjoyed were James Curtis’s They Drive By Night (£12.99) and Robert Westerby’s Wide Boys Never Work (£12.99). Curtis (1907-77), in particular, is a real find — one of those cultivators of metropolitan low-life whose books bristle with an extraordinary streetwise slang that they seem largely to have made up as they went along. Slightly less long in the tooth was the firm’s reissue of Alan Sillitoe’s 1970 picaresque A Start in Life (£12.99). Sillitoe’s 80th birthday, which could have been made a bit more of in the media, was also marked by an excellent biography: Richard Bradford’s The Life of a Long-distance Writer (Peter Owen, £25).

Elsewhere, James Knox’s Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster (Frances Lincoln, £25 and £15), which accompanies the current Wallace Collection centenary exhibition, was a revelation. I began it with the vague idea that Lancaster was an amusing cartoonist with a lot of famous friends and ended it thinking him one of the most distinctive comic artists of the 20th century, up there with Ronald Searle in terms of range, scope and originality of line.

P. J. Kavanagh

In the winter of 1896, on a barrow in Charing Cross Road, a mid-17th-century manuscript found by a scholar was eventually proved to be by Thomas Traherne. This was Centuries of Meditations, short, ecstatic appreciations of this world, this universe, by a Church of England cleric who insists on happiness (‘felicitie’), given us by God if we could only learn to see it. Since then much more Traherne has been discovered, most of it in the same delighted, delightful vein. Happiness and Holiness (Canterbury Press, £19.99) is a selection from the Centuries and from these new finds. It is a sort of Traherne Reader, beautifully and informatively edited by Denise Inge. Traherne was a psychotherapist before the word was invented.

House of Wits by Paul Fisher (Little Brown, £16.99) is a door-stopper, at nearly 700 pages, about the Jameses (Henry, William etc). It was a large family, including a reformed alcoholic father with a cork leg and a brilliant, neurosthenic sister, Alice. Detail is piled upon detail, like a canvas by William Frith, of Civil War America and the years that followed in the United States and in London, so that you learn what they ate as well as what they thought, and how the ships that criss-crossed the Atlantic bearing the large family were furnished. A book for a reader with strong arms who relishes colourful facts.

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