Entry to the sacred grove

Some readers may wonder if we need this book. Surely, the argument might go, one can summon up potted ‘lives’ on the internet, while serious biographies take book form. And how can even 294 lives of novelists offer, as the cover to this book claims, ‘a comprehensive history of the English novel’?

Reason not the need: this book celebrates enjoyment. And it is itself hugely enjoyable. Few, if any, of those Wikipedia entries are well written, let alone witty; most current literary biographies weigh in at around 800 pages: Sutherland’s brief lives display the soul of wit — whose essence is to encompass the unexpected.

There is a difficult balancing act, here. Sutherland’s potentially fatal Cleopatra is the donnish joke. There are, indeed, plenty of these (Thomas Arnold was ‘a man who raised religious “doubt” to acrobatic heights.’). But the compendium rarely declines into mere facetiousness. It is saved by Sutherland’s magnificent and infectious enthusiasm for the books he reads.