Enough of society. Summer is the time for freedom—woods and meadows, the ocean, the river or the road. During July and August, I suggest you read
Huck Finn by Mark Twain and On the Road by Jack Kerouac. They will make you restless to the point of pain! Here are the rogues and tricksters of the picaresque, slipped free from the codes and constraints of civilization, wandering from one adventure to another on a continent so vast that most human activities seem trivial, apart from surviving to continue the journey—a journey which takes on mythological significance.

Through the heart of Huck Finn drives the great wide Mississippi, unstoppable, imperturbable, unpredictable. Huck and Jim on their ramshackle raft, in fair weather or ferocious storms, are continually at the mercy of the river, but they are insulated from the feuding, frauding, preaching, lynching, and family life which they stop in and out of along the shores they pass. The life of the raft is more vivid and more intense than anything in these hillbilly and planting communities. By contrast to the aimless meandering typical of picaresque novels, in Huck Finn, you feel the constant and forceful tow of the Mississippi, like time itself, pushing the action along, carrying Huck, carrying Jim forward, delivering them inexorably–to the South, to the sea, to their destiny.

Each is making a bid for freedom—Huck from his sadistic, drunken father, Jim from a kind but nonetheless enslaving master. Slavery is a deeply uncomfortable theme in the book, portrayed as an evil produced by society, not by mankind. On the river, Huck feels certain of his friendship with Jim; in a house, on a farm, or in a town, he is reminded that Jim is property on the run and fears he will go to hell for failing to assist in its return. When the bizarre and extravagantly complex denouement crafted by Tom Sawyer to set Jim free proves to be irrelevant, you can understand that Tom must suffer for it, but you wonder why Jim must suffer, too. This is civilisation at its most self-indulgent, a boy inventing a fictional crisis of imprisonment and liberation based on books he’s read and of which he has no practical understanding. Better the boy had never read a book at all. Is this really the message from Mark Twain, the author of such a good one?

Instead of the river, Sal Paradise holds the tires of Dean Moriarty’s Hudson to “the white line in the holy road,” whizzing south to New Orleans, West to San Francisco. Did Kerouac choose a car named after another great river on purpose? Huck and Jim each dies a kind of death before they are reborn into their life together on the river; Sal’s life on the road begins with the end of his marriage and his own feeling that “everything was dead.” Dean Moriarty, sprung from jail rather than slavery, is always in danger of being recaptured by the police. Dean, too, is on the run from his wino dad and his untutored childhood, seeking liberation through all forms of knowledge–intellectual, spiritual, carnal.

In his first few paragraphs, Kerouac introduces so many other characters that you’re afraid you’ll forget who they are before the story gets going. It’s fine if you do. This is a book and a country peopled by hundreds, by millions, and they are all on the move–by train, by truck, by bus, by car–criss-crossing the country in a continual and promiscuous migration. New York, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, and back again. Everyone is hitching a ride, sharing their last bit of food or whisky, giving away their only warm shirt, sleeping with someone else’s partner.

The hobos of the Depression Dust Bowl and the draftees of the vast mobilization of World War II seem to haunt and energize the novel with a communal enthusiasm and generosity now lost in America; but desperate poverty and universal duty have given way to Kerouac’s post-war moment of threatlessness and possibility. Service men are permanently at ease. They want to share, to learn, to dance. Sal has a little military pay; he goes to college on the GI Bill. He and his gang are idealistic, footloose; after decades of necessity and fear, their optimism has the fervor of religious conviction.

Sal is misunderstood by one of his girls because “I like too many things.” He wants to stay up forever at the party that is the whole United States. “All I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.” The lines of transport and communication laid thickly over Twain’s raw frontier have not yet spoiled Kerouac’s American landscape; on the contrary, they make its enormity and its beauty more evident because they make it accessible, coast to coast, at seventy miles an hour.

If slavery offers a problem in Huck Finn, the women in On the Road are in another kind of chains. Neither book has any mothers. There are only aunts, trying to civilize all the lost boys or feed them sandwiches, and honey-thighed girlfriends to be slept with, shared, cheated on, condescended to. Romantic love hardly figures except as a prominent cliché. (Surprisingly similar to P.G. Wodehouse, though far more hip.) Ah, fiction! Reading these books will not make you feel distressed that you are a woman or a man, a child or a slave in a role forced on you by society, it will make you imagine you are on the raft or behind the wheel of the Hudson, breaking every bond to get outside of what you already know, having an adventure.

Let me know when you get back; I’ll have some more books for you to read.

Of course, part of me agrees with him. But when I reread Mansfield Park a few months ago, it reminded me of one contemporary, unsquare couple who not long ago were acting out the themes of the novel before the eyes of the press. (Who knows what was actually going on in their personal lives, but the public narrative, true or false, is a story in its own right.)

Say Fanny Price is Jemima Khan. Say Henry Crawford is Hugh Grant. She is a journalist, and something of an intellectual, despite her beauty and her beautiful clothes. Her columns in the press and her public protests in Parliament Square bespeak a character preoccupied with justice, goodness, adherence to the truth, to actual facts. Her public deportment, inviting as her face and figure may appear, is poised and self-contained. And her marriage was to a man of religion for whom she converted. She is a serious person.

You may object, But her father was a billionaire, her husband a great cricketer. And so they were. Her father, with his many and far flung attachments and entanglements, must have loved and ignored her by necessity just as Sir Thomas Bertram did his penniless niece Fanny. And her husband turned his sporting discipline into a commitment to public life so rigorous that it seems in the end to have excluded even his pretty Western wife, though she evidently remains loyal to many of his beliefs. She is a bluestocking, with an inner purity that matches Fanny’s. Okay, she loves a party, just as Fanny loved her ball.

Hugh Grant may have seemed like a challenge at first. Everybody wanted his undivided attention; nobody could get it. But perhaps like Fanny with Henry Crawford, Ms. Khan paid him no attention at all, and consequently he elbowed his way through all the flirts he’d helplessly attracted in order to get to her. By his own admission, she really got to him. Rumor had it that he was so in love he would give up acting. It was boring anyway compared to Jemima Khan. Henry Crawford was transformed.

But how was he to keep himself busy all day? Mr. Grant travelled. He read books. He started writing a novel (which he read only to her). But a day is long. A week is longer. Henry Crawford likes to stay entertained. Golf took up quite a lot of time, until he went to Dubai, hooked himself up with electrodes, and saw on a screen what his swing actually looked like. It was so ugly, he said, that he could never play golf again. t wasn’t important to him how far the swing made the ball fly, just how it looked. Clearly the man is born for show. We love him on the screen and that is where he is meant to be. So Mr. Grant made another movie, and another.

In my memory, the end of the Khan-Grant relationship was prophesied by those billboards depicting a bubbling romance between Drew and Hugh in Music and Lyrics. Fanny Price would not have been able to stand it. The man of her heart, super life size, pretending to fall for someone else. And I’ll bet Ms. Khan couldn’t stand it. It’s not about being insecure or unnaturally jealous. It’s her moral character: just like Fanny, she would have found it agonizingly indecorous, undignified, inappropriate. A public pretence of an emotion which in her own experience, as she has written in the press, has religious qualities.

The month after filming began, Mr. Grant acted out a public love scene with Ms. Khan – the famous balcony scene in Venice. As if kissing her billboard high at the end of countless camera lenses could obliterate the images he knew would soon be appearing of him with Ms. Barrymore. Fanny would have died of shame! But it can’t have had any effect on whatever images were in Ms. Khan’s own head; after all, being in the balcony scene, she couldn’t watch it. And one suspects she might not have liked it any more than Fanny. What she appeared to want was an authentic life, in private.

They’ve long since split, like Fanny and Henry. Over and over again, but, supposedly, finally for good. Presumably Ms. Khan will find herself an Edward Bertram (for all I know, she already has, but such a discovery would have to be tested by time). Meanwhile, the Maria Bertrams are happily ruining themselves over Mr. Grant everyday. Just check your tabloids. Nevertheless, it still gives the heart a twinge that he could never prove himself “good enough” for Ms. Khan. This is where Jane Austen had it right and Hollywood would probably pretend it’s otherwise and marry them off to one another anyway. Two things are for sure: Mansfield Park, far from being outdated, portrays two character types still very much alive in England. And if this blog turns into a movie, I’ll be rushing to buy my ticket to watch Hugh Grant play Hugh Grant.

Edward Bertram and Fanny Price, Pao-yu and Black Jade: the reader can tell early on that these pairs of cousins raised in the same households are meant for one another. But they are confronted with so many obstacles – social codes and ceremonies; religious beliefs and duties; elaborate daily routines of eating, grooming, sleeping; teenage moodiness, doubt, pride, and shyness; fine sensibilities and senses of decorum; the ambition and cruelty of those who live with and supposedly care for them; above all the threat of other, perhaps more suitable, richer partners.

Can the lovers ever discover and grow sure of their feelings for one another, let alone persuade the adults who hold sway over them to let them marry? All the while, the claustrophobia of the domestic setting intensifies the erotic energies coursing beneath the surface.

In Mansfield Park, the characters play whist in the evenings and ill-advisedly try to put on a play; in Dream of the Red Chamber, they gamble at mahjong and establish a literary society. In both novels, there is a lot of sewing and walking around in the shrubbery. The repartee is subtle and pointed. Delicate emotional tendrils creep out through the dialogue, testing, hoping, only to be crushed by misunderstood replies, intervention from outsiders, interminable delays for illness, for travel, for study, for service to others. Every nuance is agonizing and delicious.

Wealth and refinement mean the characters are perilously free of necessary occupation. In Mansfield Park, the long absence on business of Sir Thomas Bertram, the patriarch, leaves a vacuum of judgement and authority at home, so that the burgeoning appetites of his daughters fix themselves wildly and inconsistently in all the wrong places. The Park becomes a wilderness—rampant with greed for attention and pleasure.

Chia Cheng is as irresponsible toward his family as Sir Thomas Bertram, for some of the same reasons. And both households feature a wicked sister-in-law with an unscrupulous hand on the purse strings. The governing hierarchy of wives and concubines at the Chias is more numerous than at Mansfield Park and more intelligent. You can decide whether they are any better at supervising family life.

A surprising aspect of the Chia household is the number of maids attending each family member, and the intimacies both emotional and physical that occur between maids and their masters and mistresses. Beautiful young women with names like Pervading Fragrance, Bright Design, Patience, Purple Cuckoo, decorate and infinitely complicate the plot. Pao-yu’s dreams sometimes merge with his waking life; no longer a boy nor yet a man, he is afforded the liminal luxury of privacy for surprising sexual experiments. This unofficial layer of sexual experience is reflected officially and prominently in the story of the daughter of the household who leaves her family to become a concubine to the emperor.

The possibility of choosing the wrong spouse through lack of discrimination and self-restraint is not the biggest calamity on offer in either of these novels. Flirtation can lead uncontrollably to the bedroom, to the shattering of taboos, the ruin of reputations, a life enforcedly spent outside the margin of the milieu, death from loss of honor, or from a broken heart.

I liked Chi-Chen Wang’s abridged translation of Dream of the Red Chamber (1958, not 1929); there is also a Penguin, complete, in five volumes, titled The Story of the Stone. Even if you have to learn Chinese, don’t miss this extraordinary book.

Collective ideologies like Marxism and Fascism shaped the political understanding of Isherwood’s and McCarthy’s generation; Freud, Jung and the like shaped their understanding of the mind. In characterizing a group of people, a generation, a clique, Lions and Shadows and The Group both evoke the possibility of a norm, a type, and so they raise the question, What is normal? What is healthy?

In Lions and Shadows, Isherwood tells how, after flunking out of Cambridge, working as a tutor and a secretary, and getting nowhere, initially, as a writer, he decides to go to medical school. But in fact he is more interested in mental than in bodily health. The novel concludes with his decision to leave medical school and go to Berlin where he can pursue the theories of the American psychologist, Homer Lane: “Every disease, Lane had taught, is in itself a cure–if we know how to take it. There is only one sin: disobedience to the inner law of our own nature.” Isherwood comes to believe that bodily ills have psychological causes: the sore throat which has plagued him on and off through the book – as Weston, the Auden character, informs him – “means you’ve been telling lies.” But what has he been lying about?

Everything. His life and his writing are “sham.” For Isherwood, the writer’s own psychology presents a continual challenge to objectivity. The closer he gets to autobiography, to factual reporting, the more aware he seems to be that his mind filters, fictionalizes, and even falsifies any “true” account of events. And there is something more specific. In later autobiographical books, in particular Christopher and His Kind published in 1976, Isherwood makes clear that he is homosexual and that the “cure” which he sought in Berlin was freedom to explore his sexuality without embarrassing his family or risking arrest. In 1938 when he published Lions and Shadows, he could not write openly about such things without chancing legal prosecution. They remain coded in the novel. It is partly this repressed sexual energy which magnetizes his group of friends, a secret excitement shared among several though not all of them.

A similar repressed sexual energy is at play in The Group. Lakey, too, goes abroad to explore her sexuality, and it becomes explicitly evident to her friends only when she returns with her lover in tow. Yet her friends all felt her love intensely, and this made the group cohere. Once the members of the group begin to pursue their separate sexual identities in love and marriage, they discover that the views of the Class of ‘33 are anything but collective.

Harald Petersen hates Lakey’s “abnormality,” proving himself to be far more conventional than he pretends. He is eaten up by jealousy of her power. And he cannot acknowledge his own cruelty, inconstancy, dishonesty, and irrationality. When Kay’s marriage to him fails, it is Kay’s mental health, not Harald’s, which is cast into doubt. And the doubt shimmers and changes in the reader’s mind. At first it seems clear that Kay has been betrayed by Harald—by his affairs as well as by his committing her to the mental hospital. But the longer Kay stays in the hospital, the more mentally unwell she appears to be. Is she suffering a nervous breakdown because she has been wrongly incarcerated? Or does the institutional setting provide the vocabulary, the context, which makes it possible for the reader to recognize and name something that was wrong with her all the time?

Mirroring her story is the story of Priss Andrews’s father, suffering from authentic manic-depressive psychosis. Kay is labelled crazy on leaving her marriage; Mr. Andrews, on the other hand, is suddenly labelled sane when he divorces his wife. Sane enough, anyway, to lead a free life. Is this because he is a man?

The question of Kay’s sanity recurs when she falls to her death from the window of her room at the Vassar Club while, evidently, straining to look for incoming Nazi airplanes. As Libby demands to know, “Did she jump or fall?” Kay was, in any case, desperate to express an identity distinct from the group. And, like Icarus, she flew too close to the sun.

The year after he published Lions and Shadows, Isherwood left England for good. He emigrated with Auden to the USA partly because the literary clique which had admired and supported them at home began to feel suffocating. In addition to sexual freedom, they wanted artistic freedom. Also, Isherwood was a pacifist, and sought freedom of conscience. Their self-imposed exile can be compared to Joyce’s—they were both readers of his work – and indeed, on the eve of their departure, Auden wrote a poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” in which the Icarus figure suggests the anxiety of breaking away from their circle of friends. Who would care, or even notice, if they failed?

…everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster: the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

(© The Estate of W.H. Auden)

Isherwood subtitled his novel ‘An Education in the Twenties’. His generation—McCarthy was six years younger than Isherwood–came to maturity just in time for the Thirties. On leaving university, they were greeted by the Depression, and many of them were attracted to communism, the ideology of the group. They were concerned with the material condition of society, and as artists they were aware of themselves as part of a wave of events moving in a broad historical and cultural context.

To them, the Romantic individualist was a forlorn, old-fashioned figure. Theirs was a rebellion of all youth against age, of children against authority. They shifted fiction closer to fact, inventing the new genre, reportage. And despite what may seem like earnest political inclinations or journalistic preoccupation with accuracy, they dared not take themselves too seriously. Their wit is aimed most mockingly at themselves; both of these novels are very funny.

Lions and Shadows is an autobiography, but Isherwood introduced it by saying “it contains no `revelations’; it is never `indiscreet’; it is not even entirely `true.’” Yet it’s impossible not to recognize their real life originals in his extravagant portraits of himself, Edward Upward, W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, among others. Isherwood fictionalizes in order to enhance his impressions of life, and he thereby achieves a sharper truth, a set of insights about how his generation thought and conducted themselves at school, at university, and in young adult life.

He shows the way in which their shared obsessions, their taste, their jokes, their excited, highly literary sense of humour, the peculiar style and slang of their clique, began to evolve into the predominant artistic language of their time. It was the bond among them which gave them the nerve to defy established values; when Isherwood writes joke answers on his Cambridge exams and is asked to leave the university (just as he hoped), he is thinking all the while how thoroughly his recklessness will entertain his friends when he tells them.

McCarthy’s novel The Group is about eight women who graduated from Vassar together in 1933—as McCarthy herself did. It opens at the determinedly unconventional wedding of one and proceeds, almost as a group of linked stories rather than a novel, to “cover” the various milieus and social strata into which the young women disperse in their new lives in, mostly, Manhattan.

The characters are individuals, but they are also types, and they illustrate a broad sociological spread, considering they are united by possessing a diploma from Vassar. Their sexual adventures are told with candour that, even now, is both shocking and heartbreaking. Lions and Shadows seems comparatively shy, but Isherwood’s book appeared in 1938; McCarthy published hers in 1963, by which time Isherwood was writing even more outspokenly than she about sex. Plenty of McCarthy’s material is surprisingly up to date; her episode on breast feeding could easily appear in a novel published today.

The Group is fraught with the jostling tensions of a female clique in which the struggle to join and to stay in never really abates. It portrays a Vassar education as about the most progressive and challenging a young woman could receive at the time, yet, perhaps paradoxically, this very education leaves nearly every member of the group convinced that her Vassar classmates are the only members of her generation who really matter. The men they keenly pursue can’t make the inner circle, and most of the women are more concerned to impress one another than anyone outside the clique. For some, their obsession with one another is more destructive than supportive. Only a few break free of it.

If you find that The Group lags a little in the middle, persevere; the ending gives the book shape and reveals with a predictable but satisfying twist what kind of love formed the epicentre of the clique and made it unrefusable.

As a lonely music student in Chicago, Thea Kronberg falls in love with a painting in the Art Institute. “She imagined that nobody cared for it but herself, and that it waited for her….She liked even the name of it, `The Song of the Lark.’ The flat country, the early morning light, the wet fields, the look in the girl’s heavy face—”

The painting is by Jules Breton, a nineteenth-century French Realist. The solitary peasant girl, barefoot, dirty, and gripping the ancient-style curved blade with which she will cut hard in the fields all day, is arrested by beauty, her soul lifted up and evident on her face. Her simplicity seems to make her the more capable of deep feeling. We can’t see the lark, but we can observe the effect of its song–the dawning of rapture in the monumental figure of the girl, posed with pointed symbolism in front of the rising sun.

For all her training and success, Thea never loses the vigor of the natural setting in which Willa Cather presents her in childhood. Her sense of personal freedom and her boundless appetite for beauty derive from the open spaces of Colorado–wild, bright, crude, animating. She is refined by suffering—poverty, overwork, lack of recognition, a failed love affair—and travels to Europe, where she becomes both cultivated and worldly, but her passion remains innocent, pure, and deeply felt. Her voice resounds with the enormity of nature, and although we can’t actually hear her sing–any more than we can hear the lark in Breton’s painting—we can believe in her talent, because it’s offered to us in the epic terms of a whole landscape, as if Colorado were tamed within the opera house.

There is a bird metaphor at the heart of A Portrait of the Artist, too, supplied in the name, Stephen Dedalus. The mythological Dedalus, architect of the labyrinth and afterwards a prisoner there, escaped from the island of Crete on wings he fashioned himself from feathers and wax. When Stephen Dedalus, taunted by friends, hears them repeating his name, he reflects: “Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy….Now at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air.”

Dedalus was a manmade bird, who flew only by the genius of his mind and the craft of his hands. Nature had no role in his achievement, apart from offering him a bird to imitate. Whereas Thea trains her voice to express the widest possible range of human emotion, Stephen wishes to escape from emotion and from his human nature. His father’s financial ruin and Ireland’s political impotence heap suffering and humiliation on his already delicate sensibility, and the rigidity and fearfulness of his Roman Catholic education foster a schism in him between intellect and feeling; he finds the will to disbelieve by relying solely on reason, and he allows his heart to wither.

Thus, he develops an ascetic’s approach to his work, or a Jesuit’s, slyly mingling the humility of an anonymous servant with the proud self-confidence of the gifted, the anointed. His aesthetic theorizing is dry, impossibly complex, partly couched in Latin, so that his cronies can’t attack or even fathom it, and he aims to empty his art of personal feeling and indeed of personality, as if the perfected form could act as a shield or even a cloak of invisibility behind which he will be invulnerable.

According to Stephen’s theory of narrative, “The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak….The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” This passage is sometimes used to illustrate how Modernism abandoned the Romantic obsession with intensity of feeling in preference for beauty of form. Still, creation is a process, and the artist’s nonchalant pose, “pairing his fingernails,” can be adopted only after the rage of experience and the heat of composition are finished. He must nonetheless first experience these things.

Stephen tells his friend Cranly, “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning.” Thea’s story is narrated to the height of her success and beyond, whereas Stephen is left on the brink of his ambition, praying, as befits a son of Dedalus: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”

Will he, like Icarus, fly too near the sun and fall into the sea? Joyce notes as a postscript where and when he wrote Portrait of the Artist–Dublin 1904, Trieste 1914–attesting that he himself made it to Europe. But in order to see how the aspirations attributed to Stephen Dedalus are fulfilled, the reader really has to tackle Ulysses and maybe even Finnegans Wake. Though he may have used exile and cunning, Joyce did not remain silent.

For the next twelve months, I’ll be suggesting a classic book for you to read or reread each month. Keeping laziness in mind, I’ll offer the books in pairs in alternate months, two in January, two in March, and so forth.

Chances are you may have read at least one of the books, and so you will have plenty of time in which not to bother reading it again. But with two whole months, you might well get through the other book. And that might start you thinking about why I paired it with the first. In that way, both books may come alive inside your head. If you haven’t read either book–well, you have your pleasure cut out for you.

Start with The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather, first published in 1915. It’s about a girl growing up in a small Colorado town—among ranchers, farmers, miners, railroad men—at the turn from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. She is destined to be a great opera singer. She has a voice, as a writer has a voice.

At first she hides it from her small-minded and gossipy neighbors and even from her own family, but eventually it’s the only thing about her that matters. Even romance is pushed aside by it; her passion is thrilling and inspiring. The novel has turgid moments, but its trajectory is so compelling that you will revel in the melodrama. The opening scenes are among the most delicate and complete I have ever read, a portrait of disinterested love which sets the reader’s heart on a high path, hoping, right away, for the miracle which the story proves to be.

Why do writers write about the problem of being an artist? About how their identity, their destiny, fulfils and isolates them? Do readers need to understand this? Or do readers prefer stories about “ordinary” people who fall in love and marry and have children?

Alongside The Song of the Lark, read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. It was first published in 1916. For some it defines its genre. I wonder whether you will like the cerebral Irishman’s bildungsroman better than the one by the comparatively hearty American women’s magazine writer?

You can visit Katherine at www.katherinebucknell.com

I’m very pleased to welcome back to the blog Katherine Bucknell, author of What You Will and Leninsky Prospekt and a friend of Fifth Estate as far back as our launch in 2006.

Every two months throughout 2008 Katherine will be introducing and recommending a pair of classic books. One you may have read – one you probably wont have – but they’ll both be linked by a common theme.

In addition to her introductions, Katherine will also be posting occasional thoughts, questions and updates on the titles she’s handpicked – and leaving space open for your own comments.

Think you can handle twelve books in 2008? Think brushing up on your classics is a noble New Year’s Resolution? I’ve dropped a link, ‘Classics Paired’, into one of our side columns – there it is, over there, under categories – which will take you straight to Katherine’s suggestions in the year ahead. As always, we’re very keen to hear your comments and opinions – so we hope you’ll get involved.

Roll on the first selections!