Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. An amazing achievement – present tense throughout, and through the eyes of the Tudor politician, Thomas Cromwell.  It creates an utterly believable milieu, though which the great and the good, and some of the great and the bad, strut and plot.  And Cromwell is a complex character, who develops his political skills as the book proceeds.  I thought of Le Carre ’s spies on the one hand and the busy Samuel Pepys, a century later than this Cromwell, on the other.

The Fall of the King by Johannes V. Jensen. Set in almost exactly the same period as Wolf Hall, this is the story of the Danish King Christian II, famously unable to make up his mind (Hamlet ?) as told through the tale of one of his bodyguard, Mikkel, whose life brings him intermittently and then more permanently in contact with the king.  Overall, this is on of the most pessimistic books I have ever read – human beings are all doomed to fall, whether they be peasants or kings.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. Compared to the doings of Renaissance kings, the action in this novel is wholly domestic – how a young Irish girl, initially with no independence, at the whim of family and townsfolk, once she is sent to New York, begins to develop a mind of her own (slowly, though) and, after returning to Ireland on a visit, where mother and community try to keep her there, returns to her secret husband in Brooklyn, though it’s touch and go until the last minute. Some readers think she should have stayed in Ireland.

The Russia House by John LeCarre. I haven’t finished this yet, but what he does, he does so well.  And here as in a number of his books, a sort of contempt for the CIA and the US way of doing things, their paranoia.

Unlike the first of two New York novels: “The Believers” by Zoe Heller.  A family drama where none of the characters excites much interest or sympathy, poorly written, lots of cliches and which doesn’t enhance one’s understanding of the world or human nature.  It might pass as a couple of episodes of a tv sitcom.

“Netherland” on the other hand, with it’s cricket-playing Dutch exile in New York, a passive man to whom things mostly just happen, is well worth the read. Chuck Ramkissoon, the cricket-playing, scam-promoting West Indian is the real hero, along with all the other exiles who make up most of the population of New York and bring their own local customs with them.  The shadow of 9/11 is there in the background – saps the dutchman’s will.  Some nice pen pictures of The Hague, incidental to the New York stuff.

But the Royal Shakespeare Co doing As You Like it was excellent.  Very bare staging, compared to the sumptuous Kaffe Fasset set of a previous production, but it very much suited the hard, black-clad court of Duke Frederick, the usurper, and the wintry, few-leaved Forest of Arden.  I found myself thinking that the main players were all extremely competent but none stood out. On the other hand, Jacques, played as Billy Connelly by Forbes Masson, Touchstone (Richard Katz) and Corin (Geoffrey Freshwater) brought real meaning to the parts, Corin’s honest working man well emphasised, Touchstone really mad, and Jacques a melancolic with a good line in satirical humour.( I don’t think it does to play Jacques too seriously).   And the RSC always speaks the lines so clearly, they always have, so understanding is made easy.

Amongst the supporting poets, there were excellent deliveries by, inter alia, Pauline Kirk, Oz Hardwick, and Andy Humphrey.  York is doing pretty well for accomplished local poets these days, of whom Pete Morgan is one of the brightest stars.    (Other stellar talents are Anthony Dunn, Carole Bromley, Mairie McInnes and the great unsung-outside-York local hero, Don Walls).