J.m.w. turner

One day, according to a venerable anecdote, an earl pushed his way into Hans Holbein’s London workshop demanding that his portrait be painted straight away. Understandably annoyed, Holbein hit him. This nobleman then asked Henry VIII to punish the painter, but apparently the monarch replied: ‘I can make seven earls (if it pleased me) from seven peasants – but I could not make one Hans Holbeen [sic], or so excellent an artist, out of seven earls.’ Holbein’s pictures must have seemed miraculous when they appeared in Tudor England. In fact they still do. Seeing them is like opening a window into the past and finding it populated by people like

Sally Bayley’s The Green Lady is a beguiling, experimental mixture of biography, fiction and family history. In her excellent memoir Girl with Dove (2018), she wrote about her neglected childhood in the coastal Sussex town of Littlehampton. Here she returns to the same locality, but considers her forebears, embroidering episodes from her own rackety childhood into the lives of her ancestors and local people. The title refers to a hostel on the corner of the lane where Bayley grew up. Its owner, Mary Neal, opened it up to factory girls from London. This is the central image of the book, encapsulating themes of wealth and poverty, town and country, the

This is not a book about tennis. Roger Federer appears early on, trailed by the obligatory question ‘When will he retire?’ He figures more prominently in the final 80 pages – still looking, despite the imminence of hanging up his racquet, as if he moves ‘within a different, more accommodating dimension of time’. There are cameos from some of the game’s other stars at various points on the way to the exit: the young Bjorn Borg (‘heir to some non-specific Scandinavian malaise’), the often crocked Andy Murray (‘a mumble-core Hamlet’) and the middle-aged, disgraced Boris Becker (afflicted by a ‘hitherto unseen condition called testicular elbow’). But the title is a