He is acerbic when he wants to be, and has no time for posturing, arch commercialisation, or 'false euphoria'. The great thing about Hughes is that he has an exhilarating faith in - and passion for - art, without advocating its ultimate supremacy. What should you do if you harbour the sneaking suspicion that you love art, or would love art, but repeated exposure to incomprehensible 'orthodoxy' has left you assuming 'it was your own unpreparedness that prevented you from seeing the deity that lurked within Newman's zip?' Answer: read Robert Hughes essays, which are at once illuminating and eminently accessible. Murray attempts to rescue Douglas from poetic oblivion by substantial quotation (whether or not this is a valuable enterprise is debatable) but his main achievement is in the distinct conjuring of a soured life - alienating, vituperative, disturbing.

Murray's triumph is in making his subject moving - bitter, yes, destructive, yes, but the biography's clear prose and detached fascination with his subject constructs an engrossing fin-de-siècle-early twentieth-century culture without losing objectivity. A passionate proponent of the 'love that dare not speak its name' (his words) in his teens and early twenties, he later repudiated homosexuality, converted to Catholicism, damned 'sodomites' and, to all intents and purposes, became a raging, anti-Semitic bull. On the whole, the end product is a markedly unsatisfying string of ill-developed vignettes, although fans of Rutherfurd's earlier novels, London and Sarum, may well disagree.īosie, from 'boysie', an accolade bestowed upon a beautiful child by his mother, inspired passion and vitriol in equal measure as the golden-haired, hawk-profiled, sometime lover of Oscar Wilde. Kings and charters, codes and committees - all of these are in place, although human activity seems to be there to provide nebulous context for the preferred subject of flora and fauna.

this year his antlers would be bigger') hardly help. The sentimental tone is at odds with grand historical sweep, and the presence of sentient trees ('the tree knew many things') and amorous animals ('the deer thought about her buck. Sadly, although Edward Rutherfurd's research is impeccable, his passion for the past rarely elevates the desultory characters and curtailed plots that propel the book through the centuries.

Rutherfurd the forest