The Incredulity of Father Brown - G.K. Chesterton

The usual highly entertaining reactionary old hokum from Chesterton. The stories provide so much information in such a succinct fashion that the occasional offensive remark soon flies by and we are left with the fun of the little priest solving ever more outlandish crimes.

Angel - Elizabeth Taylor

The tale of an obnoxious teenage girl who grows up into an obnoxious romantic novelist, her meteoric rise followed by a gradual decline. It reminded me of Brideshead Revisisted, another bittersweet story of a low-born protagonist loved by an aristocratic brother and sister in England between the wars.

Angel herself is a magnificent creation; entirely lacking in self-perception, utterly humourless and callously inconsiderate towards others. Taylor skilfully reveals the fear underneath the brazen exterior, allowing the reader to sympathise with this memorably monstrous character.

The Elephant Man and other reminiscences - Frederick Treves

I picked this up after recently re-watching David Lynch's movie The Elephant Man - Treves is the character played by Anthony Hopkins. I was initially disappointed that the essay on John Merrick comprised only the first 30 pages, but as I continued I was increasingly impressed with Treves' sensitive observations about people in crisis. He has a Dickensian eye for the telling human detail, and a splendidly fluent prose style.

A real find.

Notorious; The Life of Ingrid Bergman - Donald Spoto

What an exasperating book! Bergman is one of my favourite movie actors, she led a genuinely fascinating life and came into contact with such intriguing figures as Hitchcock, Robert Capa and, of course, Roberto Rossellini. Notorious is a comprehensive and obviously well-researched account.

The problem, and it is a major one, is that Spoto can see no wrong in his subject's personality, actions or artistic achievements. Every performance is dazzling, every turkey is somebody else's fault. Every good call is evidence of a shining intellect, every mistake is unavoidable. When the critics offer praise they are always correct, when they write negative reviews they are short-sighted or vindictive. The nadir comes when an example of Bergman's poetry is offered up as an example of her amazing facility for light verse, but what we are actually given is 2 pages of doggerel.

Spoto's artistic judgements are also questionable, particularly his frankly insulting dismissal of Rosselini's achievments. I was also concerned about the apparent elisions over Bergman's pre-war flirtation with Goebbels' UFA studio.

It takes a bit of reading between the lines, but Bergman emerges as a sympathetic figure. Prone to horrific misjudgements in her love life and lacking self-awareness, but she was a superbly intuitive performer and a loyal friend.

The Abbess of Crewe - Muriel Spark

A short, curious tale of convent-based skullduggery that I wouldn't have clocked as a Watergate satire had not the cover blurb tipped me off. There is an absurdist feel to events and the titular character is memorably odd.

Thames; Sacred River - Peter Ackroyd

I am an Ackroyd fanboy, and I particularly adored London; The Biography, but this is a far more problematic affair. I think the main issue is with the editing that fails to gloss over a confused structure that alternates between geographical and thematic patterns. There are also some wild contradictions. In one chapter the Thames is described as a conservative river, later as a radical one; it is also described as both filthy and pure within the space of a few pages. The radicalism section also misses out on notable performances by both The Clash and The Sex Pistols on boats close to parliament.

Unsurprisingly, the best sections are those that feature historical mysteries and folk myths. I didn't know about the tunnel that runs underneath Tower Bridge, so close to the river bed that you can hear the water rushing by overhead.

There is also the extraordinarily unfortunate Lizzie Stride who survived the horrific 1878 Princess Alexander disaster but lost her husband and 2 children. A downward path to poverty and prostitution followed, culminating in her murder at the hands of Jack The Ripper.

Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants To Do This, and other lies from a life in the screen trade - Bruce Beresford

I'm not quite sure how I ended up reading an unhailed memoir by a director none of whose films I have watched. I idly picked it up from a mate's bookshelf and ended up finishing it a couple of days later.

Beresford writes smoothly tells some interesting stories, but I'm not sure I like the bloke. He is snobbish, offers up banalities as insight, and describes the physical attributes of virtually every woman he meets in tedious, lecherous detail.

Where the book does deliver is in its revelations about the life of a fair-to-middling director trying to get films made in Hollywood. There are endless meetings with dodgy financiers and rewrites of hopeless scripts, between which he occasionally gets to watch a couple of movies on a miniscule screen during a plane flight. The true irony comes at the end, when the only project that actually gets made is the one he has been trying to get out of for most of the book.

Doctor Thorne - Anthony Trollope

In a fine example of the nominal determinism so rife in the Victorian novel, the eponymous hero is hard, spiky, and resolute in the defence of the rose - his niece, the blandly virtuous Mary.

Trollope peoples his Barsetshire with convincing and three-dimensional secondary characters that carry the reader through this over-extended story. In particular I would have liked to have seen more of the cheeky, strikingly modern wealthy spinster Miss Dunstable.

The resolution of this archetypal plot (dodgy wills, mysterious parentage, thwarted love) is telegraphed way in advance and leaves the reader in the uncomfortable position of willing for the death of a character so that the "right" person inherits the dosh. In fact, the whole book is almost derailed by conflicted and contradictory attitudes towards class, money, duty and snobbery.

I suppose it is a testament to the sensitive and gently humorous qualities of Trollope's writing that the novel ultimately overcomes its obvious shortcomings to become rather enjoyable.