Circus Of Dreams: Adventures In The 1980s Literary World

John Walsh                                                                                                 Constable £25

Rating:

For two weeks in 1971, an air of ‘skittish playfulness’ hung over London’s Bloomsbury district thanks to an event calling itself the Bedford Square Book Bang.

Along with a marquee selling books, a poets’ corner and a cookery tent whose attractions included a young Mary Berry, it offered a programme of debates and readings with authors from Alan Sillitoe to Barbara Cartland.

It made a deep impression on 17-year-old Londoner John Walsh, and would help steer him into a career in literary journalism.

Looking back half a century later, he asserts that it also marked a sea change, luring writers out from behind their desks to mingle with fans.

By the time Walsh graduated from Oxford and arrived at the publishing house Victor Gollancz, a book renaissance had begun. The 1980s were to become a golden age – not just of what was written but of innovations in the way it reached its audience.

As publishing went from being a gentleman’s occupation fuelled by clubland lunches to an industry noted for whopping advances, Gatsby-esque launches and televised awards ceremonies, it inspired boozy bad behaviour and hot gossip.

Walsh himself never could resist a party, and he isn’t coy about relating some saucy shenanigans involving everyone from publishing titan Lord Weidenfeld to Princess Margaret.

Nigella Lawson, Rupert Murdoch, Tina Brown and Sue Townsend parade across these pages to varying degrees of eyebrow-raising effect.

Determined to become a literary editor on a national newspaper by the time he turned 35, Walsh was cautioned to keep his boyish enthusiasm in check. It’s advice he continues to ignore, with gleeful exclamations such as ‘Hooray’ and ‘Whew!’

He’s also an irrepressible caricaturist. The agent Pat Kavanagh was a ‘regal dominatrix’, Jilly Cooper ‘an 18-carat gossip’.

And yet, threaded through these irresistibly louche vignettes is a seam of serious lit crit.

Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Rose Tremain, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie and Pat Barker – all were among a glut of talented new writers galvanising British letters, and Walsh casts a shrewd eye over their careers, as well as that of his hero Martin Amis.

Towards the end, engaged nostalgia gives way to faint melancholy.

The lionisation of Sally Rooney, whose Normal People Walsh finds ‘a blandly written, linguistically unadventurous, Young Adult novel of schoolgirl romance’, sums up for him today’s bleak publishing landscape.

Newspapers were once fond of stunts such as asking a writer to review their own book. How would Walsh review this? Maybe with a characteristic, and not inappropriate, ‘Gosh!'

Butler To The World

Oliver Bullough                                                                                               Profile £20

Rating:

If you’re an oligarch who doesn’t fancy paying taxes, or a kleptocrat who wants to avoid awkward questions about where your money comes from, the best thing you can do is head for Britain.

Here, explains Oliver Bullough in this shockingly timely book, you will be able to call upon a fleet of lawyers and accountants who will show you how to exploit loopholes in English and Scottish law so you can hang on to your ill-gotten gains.

More than keeping your millions under the radar, these discreet British helpers will show you how to launder your reputation by making a donation to a museum, university or football club. Play your cards right and you might meet royalty.

Bullough characterises Britain’s role as being like that of the fictional butler Jeeves, who endlessly helps his feckless employer Bertie Wooster out of tight spots with the village bobby or his fearsome Aunt Agatha.

Jeeves knows how to make problems go away.

And that, says Bullough, is what Britain has been doing since 1956, when the Suez crisis marked the end of the Empire.

If we no longer had the power to boss other people around, we could at least make ourselves useful by offering them an ‘ask no questions’ approach when it came to maximising their fortune.

Long before Putin’s people made a beeline for London, there were plenty of warlords and gangster capitalists who made use of such places as the British Virgin Islands or Gibraltar as a convenient resting place for their piles of cash.

Will the Ukrainian invasion mark a turning point in Britain’s addiction to other people’s dirty money? Bullough isn’t optimistic.

The justification he gets time and time again from today’s British butlers is that ‘if we didn’t do it, then someone else would’. Is that really a good enough reason, though? After reading Bullough’s excellent book, the answer is far from clear.

Kathryn Hughes