Spectator books of the year: Bevis Hillier on the closest thing to a British War and Peace

Though artfully plotted and well written, some of Rachel Billington’s early novels, starting with All Things Nice in 1969, had a tinge of Mills & Boon. Reviewing one of them, Auberon Waugh wrote: ‘The hero is described as “smooth and pink”. Good: I hate green, prickly heroes.’

By the time she wrote A Woman’s Age (1979) — a novel covering roughly the same lifespan as that of her mother, Elizabeth Longford — Billington had matured into about the same standing as Elizabeth Jane Howard. Though Howard’s Cazalet chronicles are pleasurable to read and laced with intellect and wit, she is not in the same class of acclaimed ‘literary novelist’ as, say, Colette or Iris Murdoch.

With Billington’s new novel, Glory (Orion, £19.99), she has broken through an invisible barrier into a distinctly higher echelon. Timed for publication on the centenary of Gallipoli — the first world war disaster in which her grandfather, Brigadier-General the 5th Earl of Longford, was killed — her book leaves behind the cosiness of upper-class dinner parties to traffic in carnage; though, like Shakespeare at his goriest, Billington relieves the grand sweep of horrors with oases of humour.