A tale of two charities

Or to be more precise, two new to me books bought from two different charity shops.

Book one I mentioned yesterday, 'Dead Heat', by Dick Francis, assisted by his son Felix Francis. The impression given in the shop, which had a number of volumes from the same series, was that the Francis team produces books to order, all of the same length. Very 19th century of them.

ITV3 failing us for once, I had a good go at it last night, and failed, perhaps along with the previous owner, the book feeling fairly new. Failed partly because it was not so much a crime thriller as a vehicle for a series of lectures on the running of a moderately posh provincial restaurant. With occasional diversions, for example to the sport of polo. I am used to thriller writers doing this sort of thing - one of the Bond books, for example, includes tutorials on the diamond trade - but one does like the story to figure larger in the text than the tutorials. Perhaps the apprentice - that is to say Felix - has not yet reached the standard of the father Dick. Interested to read in Wikipedia that Francis (Richard Stanley "Dick" Francis CBE FRSL (31 October 1920 – 14 February 2010)) was a first rate hunt jockey before becoming a writer; I had always assumed that he had been a second rate jockey before chucking that in for something which paid better.

Interested also to learn that the current president of the rather grand sounding Royal Society of Literature (http://www.rslit.org/) is one Colin Thubron, a literary eminence who has hitherto escaped my notice, despite his illustrious ancestry. But BH says that she has heard of him, and not in the role of talking beard either.

Book 2 is 'Zuleika Dobson' by Max Beerbohm, a book of which I had not previously heard and an author of whom I was only dimly aware. But at least I finished this book, enjoyed it even.

A slightly odd production in that it has the Folio Society logo embossed on the base of the spine while the book itself claims to have come from Yale University Press, via a printer in Milan, in 1985. There is a mention of a previous edition from the Folio Society in 1966, but that is it. Silence otherwise. But the main point of this edition is that it includes reproductions of the large number of illustrations from the brush of the author himself; a small number of full page illustrations and a large number of marginalia and such like, many if not all of them taken from the author's own copy of the book, where they started life. Plus a reproduction of the bit of Bradshaw pasted into the back of same book. The introduction includes a discussion of the merits or otherwise of illustrating fiction, a practice which is generally not approved of by serious readers. The introduction admits this point while claiming this book as one of the few exceptions to the rule; and, having read the book, I agree.

An engaging tale, full of a rather gentle humour of a sort not much seen nowadays, an evocation of an Oxford world of more than a hundred years ago which I imagine is now largely lost, except perhaps in rather self conscious revival. With Morse & Lewis being the closest that most of us will ever get. And a heroine (the Zuleika of the title) who manages to enslave pretty much all the young men she meets, despite being vain, lazy, dim and not beautiful in the ordinary way. But she has the necessary something to score heavily in the man department.

I must find someone who reads (there are 350 pages of it) and who also knows Oxford, either town or gown, for a second opinion. Or maybe Cambridge would do, which would widen the field a bit.

One oddment. The Bullingdon club of Barclay Bike fame (see, for example, 15th March) gets a mention, but only by way of contrast to a far older and more select club called 'The Junta'. Presumably fictional.