Book Reviews

‘You can tell a river-lover. They cannot help but pause on a bridge to investigate what lies beneath.’ It is hard to imagine anyone not doing that, but our author is a generous soul and wishes to include us all in his passion. I wanted to celebrate the ways in which rivers stirred spirits and set imaginations alight; to learn how they were worshipped, and then abused and overlooked … I needed to make a river journey; the question was, which river? He chooses the River Trent, which cuts across England from west to east, more or less dividing south from north, 170 miles of it before it disappears into

Why do we write? Dr Johnson had no doubts, or pretended to have none: ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’. This is manifestly false, unless you make writing for some other reason one of your definitions of the word ‘blockhead’. In any case it’s not true of Johnson himself. Despite the indolence for which he reproached himself, he was an assiduous correspondent, writing long thoughtful letters to his friends. Likewise, there are those who — obsessively — keep journals or diaries without, until recently anyway, expecting ever to profit from them. The American novelist Jay McInerney has suggested that writing comes ‘out of a deep well

In 1958, Daphne du Maurier published a collection of short stories, The Breaking Point. Justine Picardie’s novel Daphne begins the year of the stories’ composition, 1957. Du Maurier, then Britain’s best-selling novelist, struggles with her own breaking point. Newly acquainted with the infidelity of her husband, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning, known as Tommy, she oscillates between anger and despair. Tommy succumbs to a nervous breakdown. Daphne’s mood is not lightened by her current literary preoccupation, a biography of Branwell Brontë. In Picardie’s hands, Daphne dreams of rescuing Branwell from critical obscurity by proving him the author, at least in part, of his sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Ultimately she acknowledges

Some roles in domestic service truly capture the imagination and have supplied English literature with several of its most enduring figures. There are the manservants from Sam Weller to Jeeves. There are butlers, including the terrifying one who receives the news of Merdle’s death in Little Dorrit with such equanimity, Henry Green’s Raunce, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s infinitive-splitting Stevens in The Remains of the Day. Surely, however, no domestic role has provided so many poignant inventions as that of the governess. From the moment the threat of the ‘governess-trade’ is made to hang over the head of Jane Fairfax in Emma, the 19th-century novel can hardly do without it. Governesses in

I first met Simon Briscoe when, as a young MP enjoying a summer evening by the House of Commons terrace bar, I observed a youth in a Refreshment Department staff uniform pelting a group of Thames ducks with dry roasted peanuts. ‘Could you sink one?’ I asked. ‘Thanks,’ he said: ‘a pint of lager and a packet of crisps if you’d be so kind.’ We fell into conversation. Briscoe had recently landed a coveted position as a graduate trainee at the Treasury, but for light relief was moonlighting as a glass-clearer over the road at the Palace of Westminster. He went on later to an investment bank, and now writes