The Best of Brit Lit

560 Novels and 900 Novelists, in Brief

John Sutherland is a distinguished English professor who has become a great literary journalist in his later years. The second edition of his Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction has just been published and David Grylls marvels in the TLS this week at one man's success in making synopses of 560 novels and giving biographical studies of 900 novelists. No implausible publication with “interpolated essays on the virtues of sanitary improvement” is beyond his sight. Nor did many people know before that Samuel Butler and Festing Jones “shared the sexual favors of the same woman by weekly calendar arrangements.” This is the scale of personal endeavor which, in an age of committees and teams, we may never see the like again.

An Old Fogey Is Redeemed

Arnold Bennett is out of fashion among critics, a literary fogey whose pioneering hotel novel, Grand Babylon Hotel, is less well-known than the haddock-filled omelets that bear its author's name on menus. Virginia Woolf used him a symbol of the bricks-and-mortar, facts-and-figures fiction against which she had set her own work—and few have come off well in a battle against Ms. Woolf. The novelist and critic, Margaret Drabble rescues Bennett this week from the worst of the charges against him. He was a modernist in disguise, she says, although Grand Babylon Hotel is still “absurd.”

Sebastian Faulk’s Moriarty

How exactly did hedge funders do their prosperity-destroying deals? The financial pages tell you something but it takes a good novelist with good contacts to make it crystal clear. Sebastian Faulks is a former journalist who became a world-renowned fiction writer with his tunnels-under-trenches novel, Birdsong. Since then he has moved his subjects through World War Two, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s Britain and has finally reached the 21st century. A Week in December blends skillful pastiche of great London predecessors with well-researched descriptions of how to bring down an economy and how to destroy—totally destroy—a computer hard drive. The latter requires the creation of a surprisingly large hole in the ground.

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Peter Stothard is editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He was editor of The Times of London from 1992-2002. He writes about ancient and modern literature and is the author of Thirty Days, a Downing Street diary of his time with British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Iraq war.