But then the snow turned to rain

My daughter when small came home from school one night singing these extraordinary lines: ‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me/ And will thy favours never lighter be?’

My daughter when small came home from school one night singing these extraordinary lines: ‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me/ And will thy favours never lighter be?’ Five hundred years on, this Tudor ballad, said to have been played at hangings, provides the theme, and the structure, of Seasonal Suicide Notes. Only, this being the 21st century after all, it is bawled, not from a cart to Tyburn but from a converted convent in Bromyard, being Roger Lewis’s latest book.

Once Professor Lewis had it all, for he was a butcher’s boy from Bedwas, which meant that in Wales he was of the upper class, so his childhood was full of sausages, also cine cameras, puppet theatres and a donkey called Emily. His career thus shadows that of Cardinal Wolsey, another butcher’s boy, and, like the Cardinal, he too enjoyed early academic success; but while the one rose, the other, as he himself reveals, fell. From dawn to dewy eve he fell, a summer’s day, the prize-winning graduate and Oxford don plummeting like Lucifer, only in his case into freelance writing. Except that, unlike Lucifer (and Wolsey), Professor Lewis revels in his fall.

It has allowed him to brood happily, and biliously, in Bromyard on kill fees and indifferent publishers and the even more indifferent dyslexics who run the literary pages of national newspapers, also on the rise of the great Craig Brown, another freelance writer, whose shadow now falls inexorably on every publication except Yellow Pages. This is one of the strangest books you will ever read.