I hadn’t expected to come across a new novel by John Banville when I was browsing the tables of Daunt Books in Marylebone a couple of weeks ago. The surprise was all the more pleasant when I realized The Lock-Up was the latest installment in his Strafford & Quirke series. There is much here that’s familiar. Quirke, the state pathologist, is as curmudgeonly as ever, while Strafford, the “Big House” Protestant detective, is as cool and analytical as his sidekick is emotional and unpredictable. But something is different about The Lock-Up. Perhaps it is the novel’s sweep, covering events not just in Ireland but in wartime Germany and in Israel in the years immediately after its foundation. Or maybe it’s the darker atmosphere; the evil of antisemitism, the horror of its expression in Nazi Germany, and the shameful complicity of the Catholic Church.

This novel was a delight to read, but I think even Banville’s most steadfast fans will conclude, as I did, that the denouement felt hurried and too neatly packaged. The journey was a delight, but the destination was a disappointment.

Everyone of my generation in the UK knows what is meant by the Troubles, but it’s a term we have to explain to our children. The sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland was never far from the surface when I was growing up. Most evenings the television news featured some new atrocity. A car bomb, a random murder, a punishment beating, sometimes indiscriminate violence inflicted by the British army, the Irish Republicans, or one of the many Loyalist groups. Occasionally the mayhem spread beyond the borders of Northern Ireland, as it did when Lord Mountbatten was murdered off the coast of the Irish republic or when a hotel bomb in Brighton narrowly missed Margaret Thatcher.

The Troubles are not just the backdrop to Louise Kennedy’s fine novel, Trespasses. They are intrinsic to every episode and every conversation, and as present and unavoidable in the lives of its characters as their pulses and heartbeats. Cushla Laverty is a Catholic and teaches in a local school in Belfast. She helps out when she can behind the bar of the pub her family owns. It’s a pub that includes Protestants among its customers, and one of them is Michael Agnew, a well known attorney. The two start an intense relationship that cuts across religious, class, and political divisions. Trouble is certain.

Kennedy writes beautifully, and not just about families, love, and divisiveness. She gives us real human beings, vividly and convincingly. Cushla’s alcoholic mother, Michael’s snobbish middle class friends, and most of all schoolchildren in all their wonderful innocence. Trespasses is something special.

Rotherhithe attracts quite a lot of tourists these days. I was having lunch in The Mayflower on Saturday and I heard many more American voices than English ones. I suppose it’s not that surprising. The views of the Thames from here are pretty and it’s a pleasure to stroll along the cobbled streets looking at sights such as the church of St. Mary The Virgin, the Brunel Museum, and the Norwegian Church. For U.S. visitors, of course, the appeal is even more obvious. The Mayflower, the ship that carried the Pilgrim fathers, set sail from Rotherhithe and its captain lived and died in Rotherhithe. A statue commemorating him can be found in St. Mary’s churchyard. After all that local history, you may feel, as I did, the need to settle in to one of the comfortable seats in The Mayflower pub and enjoy some excellent food and local beer. If so, give in to the temptation. You won’t be sorry.

Seicho Matsumoto was forty years old when his first book was published. He may have been a slow starter, but by the time he died in 1992 his work had won multiple prizes and he had become widely recognized as Japan’s leading crime writer, earning the somewhat dubious and patronizing tribute from Le Monde, “The Simenon of Japan”.

Tokyo Express first appeared in Japan in 1958. The plot is straightforward and has none of the trickery and deliberate complexity that spoils so many detective stories these days. A Tokyo police officer investigates an apparent double suicide on a remote beach in the south of Japan. The country’s railway timetables play a big part in piecing together what really happened. The whole story has a charm that is difficult to describe. The elegant design of the novel was what drew Tokyo Express to my attention, but it was Matsumoto’s storytelling style that held my attention until the final page.

I bought this book in one of the few bookshops left in Singapore. Kinokuniya is a large, modern chain store located in one of the many upscale malls on Orchard Road. It could hardly be further in style from the The Book Shop, a rambling used book store in Wigtown, a small town in a little known part of Scotland. The Book Shop’s owner, Shaun Bythell, decided to keep a journal for roughly a year, beginning in 2014.

Bookselling isn’t for everyone. Used and rare bookselling suits even fewer people, which may be just as well because the trade, at least in its traditional form, is dying. Any romantic image that might still cling to it will most likely be dispelled by anyone who reads The Diary of a Bookseller. It’s not just the low earnings (Bythell records daily sales with every diary entry) or that rampaging and competing behemoth, Amazon. If those don’t kill a bookseller’s passion, the browsing public most likely will. There seems to be something about used bookshops that attracts the mad, the stupid, and the miserly.

It’s a great credit to Bythell (and his eccentric band of helpers) that he has persevered and built a celebrated and successful business. Not one that has made him rich perhaps, but one that has given him, at least intermittently, a kind of perverse satisfaction. A sense of humor and an eye for the absurd must help. This is a book rich in hilarious anecdotes and one that made me laugh out loud several times. The world needs more Shaun Bythells and more shops like the one he has nurtured in Scotland. Singapore certainly does.

I seem to be on something of a winning streak as far as reading novels is concerned. After Andrew Miller’s wonderful work comes Sebastian Barry’s latest, Old God’s Time. Its central character, Tom Kettle, is living in quiet retirement after a career as a Dublin detective. He spends his days pottering around a small apartment overlooking the sea, but his peace is broken when two of his former colleagues come knocking on his door ….

My summary makes the novel sound like a thriller, but it isn’t, at least not in the conventional sense. There may be deaths, one of them a murder, intrigue, suspicion, and a few policemen, but Barry has more in his sights than conventional clever plotting. Tom Kettle has memories and secrets, some of them shocking and tragic, and the arrival of the detectives uncovers the very worst of them. This is a novel about aging and about the ties that bind a family. It’s about memories, fantasies, stories, and the differences between them. Because it’s by Sebastian Barry, it’s written beautifully, infused with a poignancy, tolerance, and compassion that is typical of his work. Nobody who loves fiction and wants to see a master at work should miss this book.

I take the view (and I am not alone in this) that Frank Auerbach is our greatest living painter. He has been based for decades in the same studio in Mornington Crescent, and has painted throughout that time the neighborhood in which I grew up. They are demanding works. There is nothing easy about them. Canvases thickly layered in paint, almost sticky, challenging you to see what you think you know and recognize in a new way. Sinewy, tough, uncompromising pictures that I love without knowing why.

He is also a brilliant portrait painter. Much like his old friend, Lucian Freud, Auerbach has painted a small number of friends over and over again and over many decades. There is an intimacy to the portraits and sometimes great tenderness. Again, they are not always easy, but they are often wonderful and affecting.

I could not resist this recently published collection of the portraits when I saw it on the tables at Hatchards. I was tempted to snap it up immediately until a bookseller told me that a small number of copies signed by Auerbach would be available soon. I waited patiently and was rewarded after a few weeks. His paintings sell for millions, but at least I have this beautifully produced book signed by one of my favorite artists.

I wonder what Enrico Scrovegni was expecting when he commissioned Giotto to paint frescoes in his chapel at the very beginning of the 14th century. Perhaps some high-minded decoration to impress his friends and competitors. After all, Padua at that time was an intensely political place and Scrovegni was something of an operator in local society. Maybe his motives were more pure and he was looking for something quite traditional to help him focus on the divine mysteries as he prayed with his family. Whatever his expectations and motivations were, surely he cannot have predicted the wonders that Giotto would produce, one of the greatest masterpieces in Western art and work that revolutionized the language of painting.

My short visit to Padua (Padova) was not long in the planning. In fact, it was little more than an impromptu stop-off on my way from Lake Garda to Venice. Pulling off the highway, I looked for a parking spot with no plan other than to spend the afternoon strolling around what I had heard was a lovely, small city. Perhaps a quick visit to the Basilica, the Church of the Eremitani, and the ancient university? I had read previously that unplanned, same day visits to The Scrovegni Chapel were impossible. What I didn’t know was that visitors in the off-season were far fewer than in the summer, and that all I needed to do was go to the ticket office to secure my timed admission later that day.

The frescoes are fragile and are vulnerable to environmental pollution, so access to the Chapel is managed very strictly. Entry is achieved through a temperature controlled anteroom and only small groups are permitted. Once visitors are inside, the Chapel doors are closed to minimize pollutants and stabilize the immediate environment. The visit is timed and quite short, so there is no opportunity to study Giotto’s masterpiece in any real depth. None of that should deter visitors. The constraints and controls are necessary, and it is a privilege to spend any time, however short, surrounded by these treasures.

It is not easy to find the words to describe how wonderful these frescoes are, or their impact, but since returning I find myself thinking about them every day. Craning my neck that day to look at the sequence of images, it was difficult to focus, such is the richness and scale of the work as a whole. The vividness of the color is remarkable in a work more than 700 years old, not to mention the sense of animation in some of the figures depicted. What Giotto achieved here in the confines of a small family chapel is nothing less than one of the greatest artworks of Western civilization.

If you visit, I recommend getting Giuliano Pisani’s guide to the chapel. It deepened my appreciation of it. And don’t miss the Eremitani church next door.

Continuing my pilgrimage to see all six of Hawksmoor’s churches in London, I walked a little more than a mile from St. Anne’s, Limehouse to St. George-in-the-East. The direct route, which I chose to take, is not the prettiest of walks, and it took me along noisy, traffic congested roads leading into and away from the old City of London. But arriving at the magnificent church, I found it set in a small oasis of calm created by the large, quiet churchyard surrounding it. It was a blustery and overcast day but the gardens east of the church were dotted with daffodils and crocuses signalling the arrival of spring.

The church was built between 1714 and 1729 with its construction funded by the same Act of Parliament in 1711 that gave us St. Anne’s and other Hawksmoor masterpieces. Sadly, the original interior was destroyed by a bomb during the Blitz of May 1941, but the strange and extravagant exterior survived somehow. With its distinctive “pepper pot” towers, St. George-in-the-East continues to stand as one of Hawksmoor’s most imposing and peculiar London churches. Don’t be deterred by the location. It’s a spectacular, unmissable building for anyone who loves the work of Hawksmoor.

In the middle of March the towns on the shores of Lake Garda start to emerge from their winter hibernation. This is the time when the restaurants, bars, and gelaterias get a fresh coat of paint and when the store owners re-stock their shelves for the influx of visitors who will arrive with the better weather. It is a good moment to be here. The days are bright and there is enough warmth in the sun to walk around the lake in comfort, but visitors are few and the lovely towns can be enjoyed in relative solitude.

I traveled perhaps two thirds of the lake’s coastline recently, from Riva del Garda on the northwestern tip to Bardolino and Garda on the east coast. The towns I visited all shared an understated elegance and, without their seasonal crowds, an air of melancholy. At this particular time of the year, this is a place for long walks, for visits to ancient churches, and for a coffee or aperol spritz overlooking the gorgeous lake. My base was Desenzano del Garda, one of the largest and loveliest towns on the lake, but if forced to pick my favorites I would have to choose Limone sul Garda, Sirmione, or Lazise. Not that a choice is required. Pretty much everywhere is easily accessible by car. My advice? See it all, pick your moment carefully, and go in the autumn or the spring.