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provide the rococo structure of this history, always presaging German terrors to come.
    A Legacy is unique. Sybille Bedford’s recollections of the houses, travels, animals and eccentricities of these excessively wealthy people are perfectly matched with her style, which is elegant, evocative, even dispassionate. The quizzical tone of this novel, too, is entirely individual. Sybille Bedford takes us within the bosom of these families, teasing them out of hiding, providing a witty elegy to – and a celebration of – a world long gone, and in English little recorded.
    Sybille Bedford was born in Charlottenburg, Germany, and lived in London. Biographer, novelist and travel writer, she drew on the experiences of her family for this famous novel.
    Age in year of publication: forty-five.
     
     

Sam Hanna Bell 1909–1990
     
1951 December Bride
     
    In the second half of the century, a few writers continued to work as though the modern movement in fiction – Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner – and the Industrial Revolution had never existed, as though they were still living in the eighteenth century. Yet there is a strange beauty and intensity about some of these books, as though the authors were well aware that they were working against the grain, telling old-fashioned stories with a dark Freudian self-consciousness.
    December Bride is set on the coast of County Antrim in Northern Ireland in a small, tightly knit Presbyterian community. After their father’s death in a drowning accident, two brothers, Hamilton and Frank, continue to employ Sarah Gomartin and her mother as servants. When the mother leaves, Sarah stays on, and to the horror of those around her she begins to consort with both brothers; no one knows which of them is the father of her children. She is an immensely selfish and bigoted woman – her hatred of a local Catholic family is extraordinary – but there’s a sort of innocence about her in the book, and her involvement with the brothers is so lovingly described, so slow and uneasy in its development, that she becomes oddly sympathetic, her independence and stubbornness seem like gifts. There are scenes towards the end of the book, when the new generation has grown up, that are heartbreaking. The writing is plain, deliberate and flawless. This is a book which everyone interested in modern fiction should read: it shows what can still be done.
    Sam Hanna Bell was born in Scotland and brought up in Northern Ireland. He worked for more than twenty years as a producer for BBC Radio in Belfast. His other books include Summer Loanen (1943), A Man Flourishing (1973) and Across the Narrow Sea (1987).
    Age in year of publication: forty-two.
     
     

(1) Saul Bellow 1915–2005
     
1953 The Adventures of Augie March
     
    Bellow’s Augie March is born into immigrant Jewish poverty in Chicago, before the Depression. Augie is on a mythical quest to discover ‘the lessons and theory of power’ but everywhere he finds greed and lies, until acquired wisdom reveals that the greedy and the prevaricators, including his good self, are not to be despised.
    This is a picaresque masterpiece, issuing forth the words and thoughts of Augie March in Bellow’s marvellous language, roiling from the gut, strong and vivid. Augie’s pilgrimage begins with his tattered childhood with his mother, his retarded brother George and his labyrinthine older brother Simon, each of them ‘drafted untimely into hardships’. Proceeding through a variety of dubious jobs and precarious adventures – wonderful street theatre involving the riff-raff, rich and poor, of Bellow’s Dickensian humanity – Augie best loves women, the flesh of them, their pernickety brokering for power. Augie chooses Thea, Mimi, Lucy, Stella and more, trailing through abortions, falcon training, each portion of female anatomy closely observed. ‘Guillaume’s girl friend … was a great work of ripple-assed luxury with an immense mozzarella bust …’
    This novel is a hymn to