I remember clearly where I was when I first realized that the coronavirus might change my life. On 10th February 2020 I had just started what I thought would be a routine business trip to Tokyo. News sources there were covering the outbreak of a highly infectious virus on a cruise ship quarantined off the coast of Japan. Friends in Tokyo were nervous, fearful that the mysterious virus we had been hearing about had spread beyond China. When I boarded my flight from Haneda four days later I was handed a mask for the ten-hour flight. On landing in London and making my way to Paris for a few days vacation, no one there seemed concerned, but I had been in Asia and I knew what was coming.

This week, more than two and a half years later, I returned to Tokyo. Getting into Japan these days is harder than it was. Visas are now required in advance and visitor numbers are controlled. Landing in Haneda I was struck by the stringent document checks. Once out of the airport, I stayed where I always stayed in the past (Ebisu), explored the neighborhoods I have grown to love (Hiroo, Daikanyama, and Nakmeguro), and had a week of meetings in familiar places. On the surface things looked much the same. For sure I saw a few shuttered storefronts in fancy Daikanyama, more mask-wearing on the streets, and routine temperature checks in official buildings, but first impressions seemed to suggest “business as usual”.

Now I’m not so sure. The Japanese seem not to have reached yet that point of collective complacency about the virus that I see in parts of the West or attained that collective determination to consign it to the past. Many are still unwilling to have face-to-face business meetings, especially with foreigners. Others will permit meetings in large, well ventilated offices, but decline (politely, of course) the lunches and dinners that in earlier times they would have been happy to have. There is a palpable nervousness. This is perhaps surprising given the relatively low mortality rate from Covid-19 in Japan compared to other countries. (Japan has recorded 34 deaths per 100,000 of population, far lower than the 318 deaths in the US or 304 in the UK). Maybe all that nervousness has provoked cautiousness that has saved lives? Or maybe the Japanese just believe in collective responsibility, an idea the West seems to think quaint and old-fashioned.

An exhibition I saw at The TOP Museum during my short visit – The Illumination of Life by Death: Memento Mori and Photography – offered a clue to what might being going on. Beautiful pictures taken by both Japanese masters (Araki, Kojima, and Tomatsu) and Western greats (such as Capa, Atget, and Arbus) capture, sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely, the imminence of death in life. The program notes remind visitors of other pandemics throughout history and how the tragedies and privations brought by the coronavirus serve to remind today’s world of something that was all too immediate for our ancestors, the briefness of life and the nearness, suddenness, and finality of death.

The second part of Robert Crawford’s two-volume biography of T.S. Eliot (the first volume, Young Eliot, appeared in 2015) opens in 1922 just after the publication of Eliot’s masterpiece, The Waste Land. We find him overworked, sick, and deeply unhappy. At the heart of his misery (and much of his sickness) is his loveless marriage to Vivien, his first wife. In a letter to John Middleton Murry Eliot writes: “In the last ten years [in other words since he married Vivien] – gradually, but deliberately – I have made myself into a machine. I have deliberately killed my senses in order to go on with the outward form of living“. The “machine” pressed ahead nevertheless, becoming a British citizen and a member of the Church of England, looking for solace in religion and work, both commercial and creative. The book follows Eliot over the course of the next forty years as honors and accolades are heaped on him and as he takes his place not only in the Establishment but also in the pantheon of the greatest writers of the 20th century. All the while it looks as if sustained personal happiness will elude him until, in the last few years of his life, he makes what proves to be a short but profoundly contented marriage.

Robert Crawford does a fine job tracing the roots of Eliot’s work back to his life. It’s fascinating to see how Eliot’s reading, his work as a publisher, his deepening Christian faith, and his turbulent personal life all influenced his poetic and dramatic output. But Eliot After The Waste Land is the biography of a man, not just of a celebrated writer, and that is a remarkable achievement in itself. Admired and liked by many, but fully known and understood by almost no one, Eliot is shown here in all his complexity and contradictions.

Eliot is a very challenging subject for a biographer. Although he was sociable and had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, he hid much of his true character from almost everyone, preferring to control carefully what facets of his personality were displayed. Even in his decades-long correspondence with Emily Hale, much of which has been accessible to scholars only recently, you sense the care he devoted to managing how much of himself he revealed. Having said all that, I sense Robert Crawford has given us as convincing and as authoritative account of Eliot’s life, character, and work as we could reasonably expect to get, and who could ask more of a biographer than that?

I lost interest in Alexis Schaitkin’s debut novel quite early on. Something about it felt tiresomely familiar. Yet another story about a privileged, white family touched by tragedy when their teenage daughter (beautiful, of course, and brilliant, of course) turns up dead on vacation on an exclusive Caribbean island. Saint X is mostly narrated by Claire, the dead girl’s sister, who, back in NYC, is obsessed with finding out what happened. Claire (who works in publishing, of course), trails one of the original suspects, now working as a NYC cab driver, and becomes obsessed about knowing what happened and what part he played in the events.

Don’t be misled by the jacket blurb that wants readers to believe that Saint X is some piece of sophisticated social commentary. It isn’t. It’s a basic and not very interesting mystery story.

Barry Lopez is a difficult writer to categorize. Essayist, naturalist, traveler, environmentalist, novelist – Lopez did it all. I’m a newcomer to his work, so my assessment of him is inevitably shaped by this set of essays collected and published posthumously, but he reminds me of one of those itinerant evangelists who draw us towards a greater understanding of our world and our experiences of it not just by what they preach and write but also by how they choose to live. (Rebecca Solnit, in her introduction to this collection, talks about “something priestly” about Lopez’s presence). Lopez traveled extensively, not as a tourist travels, but as someone seeking to live as fully as possibly in the wonders of the world. He was drawn to remote places and the people who live and work in them – Alaska and Antarctica, for example – and also to every corner of the United States. His particular brilliance, it seems to me, was his ability to communicate a sense of place with remarkable vividness, to relate what specific places meant to him, and, by extension, to explain why they ought to matter to us.

He saw very clearly, and much earlier than most of us, the terrible destructive impact we are having on our planet, on its species and habitats, and on the human communities who live in the remaining wildernesses. He wanted to warn us, but most of all he wanted us to pay attention and to learn. “Perhaps attention is what we owe one another and the world first, and this writer wandered about, paying it out lavishly, and writing down what he learned as an exhortation to others to likewise pay attention“.

I suspect Susan Hill has lost interest in her Simon Serrailler series of crime novels, in which A Change of Circumstance is the eleventh and most recent book. The plotting has become cursory and in this instance amounts to little more than a tale of low-level drug dealing. As for the hero of the series, Simon Serailler in this outing barely develops. It all feels perfunctory. Perhaps the author or the publisher (or both) couldn’t resist what was bound to be yet another big payday. Dedicated fans won’t care much, I suspect, but it’s a shame to see the series run out of steam like this. If it can’t be reinvigorated, it should be brought to an end.

In 1945 three friends jointly purchased a country home in a tiny Dorset village called Long Crichel, establishing unintentionally what became perhaps the most celebrated literary and intellectual salon in England in the twentieth century. The Crichel Boys, as they came to be known, were bonded by deep friendship and shared cultural interests. All were homosexual. Over several decades Long Crichel House attracted England’s artistic elite. Benjamin Britten, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Duncan Grant, Frances Partridge, and scores more were regular visitors, enjoying the civilized and relaxed hospitality of the three original owners – Eddy Sackville-West, Eardley Knollys, and Desmond Shawe-Taylor – and two others who bought into the house later.

The house and its owners feature often in diaries I love, such as those of James Lees-Milne and Frances Partridge, so I was eager to read Simon Fenwick’s book when I heard it had been published. Although I enjoyed it, it wasn’t quite what I expected, and I turned the final page with a slight sense of disappointment. Overall I feel Fenwick was unable to portray with equal vividness all five of the Crichel boys and to convey what daily life in the house was like. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from reading The Crichel Boys, not just about their unusual menage, but also about intellectual life in post-war England.

Feeling a little under the weather recently, I searched my bookshelves for a “comfort read”. Something undemanding, entertaining, and diverting. I came across Vengeance by John Banville (when he was still using Benjamin Black as his pseudonym). An old train ticket from 2013 used as a bookmark implied I had read the novel before, though how I might have forgotten the brilliant and shocking opening chapter is something I don’t want to think about too much. It’s a satisfying yarn, set in Dublin in the 1950s and featuring Dr. Quirke, the lonely curmudgeon who is the city’s official pathologist. The suicide of a prominent businessman and the subsequent murder of his partner draw Quirke into the shenanigans of Dublin’s upper middle class, where infidelity, backstabbing, and disloyalty are de rigeur.

Banville’s mystery novels depend to some degree on the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief. How does a pathologist get so much latitude to do detective work and never step inside the mortuary or perform a postmortem? No matter. Quirke is a wonderful creation and Banville an exceptionally gifted writer. Vengeance proved to be the pick-me-up I needed.

The short story is an unforgiving form. In the hands of those who mastered it (think William Trevor, for example), it can be the perfect distillation of experience and emotion, but it exposes those who prize a showy style, those who can’t resist the extra word, and those who haven’t learned that subtraction, not addition, is the key to perfecting it.

It would be very unfair to find fault with a writer like Colin Barrett because he hasn’t yet reached the heights attained by the likes of Alice Munro. He’s barely forty years-old, but has already won awards and attracted a lot of positive criticism for his stories. Homesickness is the first collection of his that I have read, and I enjoyed many of the stories very much. The setting is often the small towns and countryside of County Mayo, a place where I have spent some time over the years, and that enhanced the pleasure for me. Having said that, none of the stories made a deep impact, but I’ll be looking forward to what comes next from a talented writer.

There is no way to avoid saying this. No one would have written a biography of Monica Jones if she hadn’t been the long-time friend, some-time lover, and correspondent for nearly four decades of Philip Larkin. She had a largely undistinguished career as a university teacher. She had few friends and was often disliked by colleagues and acquaintances. She was a racist and anti-Semite. Her life was blighted by bitterness, loneliness, and alcoholism. And yet from 1946 to 1985, Monica Jones was arguably closer than anyone to one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. She was the primary beneficiary of Larkin’s will and received on his death all his manuscripts and letters (many of which she destroyed).

John Sutherland, her biographer and one of the UK’s most distinguished literary scholars and critics, was one of Monica’s students in Leicester from 1960 and became her friend. That last part might mystify many readers because, on the evidence of this book, Monica was thoroughly and consistently horrible. But Larkin may have been even worse. I have read at least one biography of him, as well as collections of letters he wrote, not just to Monica Jones but also to his coterie of male friends like Kingsley Amis, so the nastier sides of his personality were familiar enough to me. Sutherland, however, has deepened my dislike of Larkin the man by filling out what we know about his stunted and manipulative personality, his misogyny, and his deceit.

Larkin and Jones might have been well matched in so many ways, but they were very bad for one another. He was a blight on her life for decades. She, though helpful to his poetic output in the early years, was treated appallingly, but lacking the self-confidence to break free from a toxic and deeply damaging relationship she was the co-creator of her own misery.

Celia Paul puzzles me. I find some of her paintings sublimely beautiful and others very crude. Aspects of her personality also puzzle me. She’s clearly a deeply private person, and yet has written two very self-exposing books. She complains that her reputation as a painter has been overshadowed by her relationship with Lucian Freud, but seems to have done as much as anyone to make people aware of that love affair and its consequences. Not that these paradoxes matter (if they are paradoxes); she has produced some wonderful paintings and published two memorable and sometimes beautifully written books.

When she set out to write her imaginary Letters to Gwen John, Celia Paul did so as a homage by one painter to another, not as a conventional biography. Nevertheless, the letters, written between February 2019 and November 2020, reveal a lot about the character and relationships of a deeply private artist whose work during her lifetime (1876-1939) was overshadowed by that of her brother, Augustus John, and her sometime lover, Auguste Rodin. The artistic and personal similarities between Celia and Gwen are striking; the ascetic tendencies in their habits, the absolute dedication to art, the longing to be loved and understood while living entirely on their own terms and in the shadow of great artists.

Few painters, at least in my experience, can write as well as Celia Paul, especially of love, longing, and the solitude on which her art depends. Letters to Gwen John, part biography, part autobiography, and part homage, is a book infused with sadness, vulnerability, and no little nobility.