JOHN SUTHERLAND, VERSATILE man of letters, tells us that this short and engaging book is inspired by one with the same title by Isaac D'Israeli, father of Ben – who dropped the apostrophe to make his name look less Jewish (which didn't fool anybody).
The elder D'Israeli's book went through "seven editions between 1791 and 1823", a good reason for any author to take it as a model. It is, Sutherland says, "a grab-bag of bibliophile and antiquarian anecdote and literary lore – witty, charming, erudite, and above all 'curious'. D'Israeli serves up a pudding which is all plums." As a description of Sutherland's own book, this is not bad.
It is also a volume – despite Sutherland's reliance on the internet and the fact that he teaches at the California Institute of Technology – agreeably old-fashioned, a book for the bookish. What we have is pleasantly inconsequential and light-hearted literary gossip. Sutherland sets out to amuse and mostly succeeds, even when touching on sudden death, suicide (grisly stuff on "the Hemingway solution"), TB and asthma.
There is a section on literature and drugs, focusing on that pillar of Victorian rectitude, Mrs Humphrey Ward, author of Robert Elsmere, the most successful novel of faith and doubt of the 19th century. She kept her afflictions at bay, and her mind active, with cocaine. "It works like magic", she declared; and nobody threatened to bang her up as a drug abuser. Gladstone wrote a 10,000-word review of her most famous novel.
That last gobbet of information comes in a sketchy section on prime ministerial reading. Sutherland notes that Disraeli (Ben) wrote novels himself, yet curiously fails to quote his splendid, dandyish line, "when I want to read a novel, I write one". He records Stanley Baldwin's admiration for the "dark earth" novels of Mary Webb, but not his real preference for the Worcestershire sagas of Francis Brett Young. Nor does he quote Margaret Thatcher's uncharacteristically humble: "You write novels, I can only read them." (I forgive him, since this may be the first time the anecdote has appeared in print.)
He has a pleasing list, taken from a March 2007 Teletext survey, of novels that fail the Magnus Magnusson "I've started, so I'll finish" test. It's curious to find Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire coming second in this table of abandoned reading. But Sutherland has his doubts about JKR. Apart from querying the existence of Platform 9¾ at King's Cross, he questions the genesis of the Potter books as recounted by their publishers: "The idea for Harry Potter occurred to JK Rowling on the train down from Manchester to London, where she says 'Harry Potter strolled into my head fully formed', and by the time she had arrived at King's Cross, many of the characters had taken shape." A magical journey, evidently, since the Manchester to London train pulls in to Euston.
Still, even Sutherland errs, or perhaps nods. He writes of "that very select corps of writers (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Dickens) who, like public schoolboys, are generally known by surname alone". Rather old-fashioned public schoolboys, perhaps, and the list is not that select: Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Hemingway, etc, to say nothing of Russian and French novelists such as Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Sartre and Camus.
Here's another "nod". In an engaging section on writers and asthma, he cites, without questioning, the "legend ... that the pneumonia that killed Proust was precipitated by an asthmatic attack brought on by the young Samuel Beckett's cigar-smoking". Nice try, but since Proust died in 1922 when Beckett (b1906) was still a schoolboy, I hae ma doots.
Still, why spoil a good story by a pedantic insistence on accuracy? If, as Dr Johnson said, a man is not on oath in a lapidary inscription, he is still less, surely, when compiling a curious collection of literary anecdotes? Besides, Sutherland quotes approvingly that splendid Italian proverb: se non è vero, è ben trovato. If it's not true, it's well devised. And this thoroughly enjoyable book is very well devised indeed. I trust Professor Sutherland will offer a second volume.
• John Sutherland is at the Edinburgh book festival tomorrow.
The full article contains 709 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
