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The ex-Python's hero is a luckless biographer

What are the perils of biography? A professional life-and-timer would probably insist that they are narrowly practical: a stash of new information, say, looming into view just as the book reaches proof stage.

Novelists who write about biographers, on the other hand, tend to be more interested in ethical faultlines: changing your mind halfway through, for example, or acquiring new data guaranteed to dim the subject's lustre. AS Byatt in and Penelope Lively in have both written entertainingly on these themes, and Michael Palin's second novel is a further attempt to plough a fictional field whose topsoil has long since been swept away.

It was Thomas Carlyle who came up with the idea of the . Sadly, fiftysomething Keith Mabbut, Palin's protagonist, is no one's idea of an intellectual. A once celebrated environmental journalist, lately returned from Shetland and a history of the local oil terminal, neither his professional nor his personal life is up to much. His wife has left him for an older and richer man. His two children wax ever more independent. Into this ground-down middle-aged existence, most of it lived out in far from enticing north London, steps his somewhat implausible dear-boying literary agent Silla, and the even less plausible figure of Ron Latham of Urgent Books, avid to offer cash-strapped Keith a deal he can't refuse.

The subject is Hamish Melville, a veteran eco-campaigner whose reputation is almost as legendary as his refusal to be profiled, interviewed or appear on TV. The bait is a credulity-stretching advance of £180,000 (has Palin ever written a biography? Does he know what sort of sums they command these days in a world of celebrity memoirs and mommy porn?).

Initial reluctance overcome, Keith heads for darkest India in devious pursuit. Here he is kidnapped by Maoist guerrillas, rescued by the object of his quest, watches Meville mobilise the locals against a land-devouring mine and, having impressed the environmental warrior with his steely resolve, emerges with the great man on his side.

As you will already have inferred, none of this will do for shifty Mr Latham, who demands rewrites and has his own secret agenda. Meanwhile, one or two sub-plots flicker and glow. As sympathetic Mae, met in the course of the Scottish trip, proves undetachable from Lerwick, Keith is consoling himself with buxom Tessa. His daughter's asylum-seeking Iranian boyfriend is, alas, not all he seems, and the £4,000 Keith contributes to the fighting fund could have been better spent.

A high-octane prose style might possibly have given this some resonance, but Planet Palin is a world where enthusiasm is infectious, smiles thin, barks gruff and lurches violent. India, Keith discovers, is "exhilarating and alarming at the same time". Thankfully, as the deep-fried aubergines are succeeded by endless bhindi bhajis, everyone gets enough to eat.

I was worried about hard-drinking Silla, who goes down with a fluey headache and whose chauffeur remarks: "I drive her four year. I never see her look like that", but this, like much else in the book, turns out to be a red herring. If the search for the "real" Melville that occupies the novel's final stretch proves faintly predictable, then the fairytale ending is quite as far-fetched as the machinations of the obligatory rainforest-despoiling corporation.

Like nearly everything to which Palin has set his hand in a long and distinguished career, The Truth is immensely well-intentioned, resolutely on the side of the angels and overflowing with wry good humour. In some ways, this overflow is the problem. Beguiled by its evocations of subcontinental cuisine, impressed by its sagacious remarks about the "closed, conspiratorial" nature of the modern city, nonetheless the reader may well conclude that the material needed a Paul Theroux or a Justin Cartwright to do it justice.

� DJ Taylor's biographies include Orwell: The Life (Vintage).

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A literary thriller about a paranoid 'freight dog'

The opening stretch of Adam Thorpe's 12th work of fiction sends several literary ghosts scampering out from their hidey-holes. One is Thorpe's own debut, (1992), to the fictitious Wessex village of whose title the hero of this book periodically returns. There the resemblances end, for Flight, sharply written and full of the most beguiling sky-surfer jargon ("boredom tube" for long-haul flight), is a study in realignment, retribution and regret.

A well-preserved and proudly uxurious family man � until the moment he catches his wife having tantric sex with her masseur � Bob Winrush has, by his own admission, done certain things he deplores during his busy career as a "freight dog". They include the transportation of cluster bombs, napalm canisters and assorted tiger parts for the oriental market. The dodgiest job of all, alas, now come back to haunt him, was one he walked out of halfway through: a commission to fly arms to the Taliban, with a drugs package apparently booked for the flight home.

All this took place two years ago. Coming back to his bolt hole in Dubai, Winrush discovers that someone has begun to piece these threads together. Summary sacking from the current day job is followed by a burgled apartment and a visit from three burly frighteners who stop narrowly short of pitching him over the balcony. Meanwhile, the lefty Israeli journalist to whom he has granted an interview winds up dead outside a Polish armaments factory. Back home in England, scarcely a week passes without another person connected with the flight handing in his boarding pass. A conference with the only other survivor, flight engineer McAllister � himself about to skedaddle to the safety of the Virgin Islands � yields up an invitation to stay in the latter's croft on the remote Scottish island of Scourlay.

If the first half of Flight is taken up with moving about, often at high speed (Winrush manages to get out of his sabotaged car just before it explodes), the second is about staying put. Kitted out with a new identity and a great deal of weather-resistant clothing, Bob reckons to pass himself off as a vacationing birdwatcher. Cover blown by the inquisitive locals, three sources of love interest (café owner, woman next door and skinny-dipping conservationist) promisingly in view, he settles down to some paranoiac brooding, revolver permanently to hand, eyes primed for a stir of movement on the surrounding hills. While the brooding turns up a hint that the suspiciously well-heeled McAllister may have more to do with the affair than he lets on, the eventual visitation takes a wholly unexpected shape.

There never was a novel about an airline pilot yet in which the figurative language didn't bear some relation to its hero's professional life. Sure enough, Thorpe can't resist the temptation to have Bob declare that "I was fitted with four engines. Marriage, home, job, kids. I've lost three. I'm gliding on one," or have him feeling "like an obsolescent aircraft left out in all weathers", when it is the author doing the feeling rather than his creation. In mitigation, Bob manages to display both a life of his own and a nice line in wisecracking shrewdness. The novel's most convincing exchanges � Bob bantering with McAllister, or prising information out of his disapproving activist son � grow out of psychological tension, half-jokey compromises reached by people who dare not reveal all they know.

As for the overall effect, an enterprising blurb-writer has marked this down as "a page-turning thriller and a masterful work of literary fiction". Harmonising these two genres was never going to be easy, and a fair amount of the proceedings can't quite disguise the fact that Thorpe is more interested in his characters' inner lives than bombs going off. But the eerily anonymous Dubai apartment block and the rain-swept Scourlay heather are beautifully evoked, and confirm a long-held impression that Thorpe is one of the most underrated writers on the planet.

� DJ Taylor's is published by Corsair

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South Sudan accuses neighbouring Sudan of dropping bombs on area as Ban Ki-moon appeals both countries for calm

South Sudan has accused its neighbour Sudan of waging war against it after a second day of fighting in the oil-rich border region � the worst confrontation since the countries split last year.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, appealed for calm between the antagonists, which fought a long civil war before South Sudan gained independence in July last year. Oil is still the main source of hostility between the countries, which continue to spar over the border demarcation and .

In a trade of claim and counter-claim, South Sudan alleged that Antonov warplanes dropped at least three bombs near oil fields in the town of Bentiu, Unity state, on Tuesday. "They are hovering and dropping over the northern part of town in the oil fields, the main Unity oil fields," Gideon Gatpan, information minister for Unity, told the Associated Press. Sudan denied any air strikes.

The claim came a day after Sudan and South Sudan forces clashed in the border town of Jau. Each accused the other of starting the fighting.

South Sudan's information minister, Barnaba Marial Benjamin, claimed that, "without any provocation", Sudan bombed Jau before its ground forces and militia fighters moved in. South Sudan repulsed the "invading forces" back to the town of Heglig, Sudan, he added.

After the ominous flare-up on the border, Salva Kiir, the president of South Sudan, told a meeting in the capital, Juba: "It is a war that has been imposed on us again, but it is they [Sudan] who are looking for it," he said.

But Sudanese authorities accused South Sudan of making the first move. Sudanese second vice-president Al-Haj Adam Yousif told state television: "These attacks are the responsibility of the SPLA [South Sudanese military] and the South Sudanese government. The SPLA attacks have targeted our oil and our army."

Sudan alleged that the Darfur-based rebel group Justice and Equality Movement, or JEM, fought alongside the SPLA during Monday's clash.

Mohamed Atta al-Moula, head of Sudan's national security and intelligence services, told journalists in Khartoum: "We hope this will be no full war. We have no intentions beyond liberating our land."

Analysts said the incidents could be the latest move in a long game of political chess. John Ashworth, a church adviser in South Sudan and resident for 29 years, said: "It's too early to say whether this is an irreversible escalation or whether it is just another gambit in the extreme brinkmanship practised by both sides, attempting to improve their position in the on-and-off negotiations about a range of issues affecting both nations."

Asian oil group GNPOC � the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, a consortium led by China's CNPC � confirmed Tuesday's bombing. Hollywood actor and activist George Clooney has urged the United States to engage China , noting that China's oil supply has been hit so there is an opportunity to appeal to its economic self-interest.

Ashworth added: "China probably has more influence in Khartoum [Sudan's capital] than it does in Juba. There are plenty of other countries who can help South Sudan develop its oilfields, whereas Khartoum is short of friends to provide military hardware and protect it in the UN security council.

"It would be in China's interest to protect its investment in both Sudan and South Sudan by attempting to moderate Khartoum's military ambitions."

The UN's refugee agency warned that fighting in the Lake Jau border area was endangering Sudanese refugees in the nearby Yida settlement.

"Our concerns are heightened by clashes reported [on Monday] between the national armies of Sudan and South Sudan in Lake Jau and other border areas," UNHCR's chief spokesperson, Melissa Fleming, said in Geneva.

She added that UNHCR was in regular discussion with refugee leaders in the South Sudan settlement of Yida about "the urgent need to relocate in order to avoid civilian casualties among a population that has already endured a great deal of trauma."

The fresh violence prompted Sudan to cancel President Omar al-Bashir's trip to meet President Kiir next week. The leaders had been due to resume negotiations left over from a 2005 peace deal that eventually saw South Sudan secede from Sudan.

South Sudan had given assurances that Bashir would not be detained and handed over to the international criminal court, .

Yousif said: "The visit of President Bashir was tied to good neighbourly relations. There is no way for this summit to take place now."

But Barnaba Marial Benjamin said South Sudan still expects Bashir to attend the meeting next week. He said the "forces of war" in Khartoum were trying to derail the peace process, but not Bashir himself.

"Our president has said clearly we will not be dragged into a senseless war," he told AP. "We will not be dragged into a conflict with Sudan."

Earlier this year South Sudan stopped pumping oil because it said Sudan, which owns the crucial pipelines, was stealing its oil. Both countries have accused each other of supporting rebel groups on either side of the border, though both deny the allegations.

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by DJ Taylor

Sketches by Boz (1833-1836)

Originally written as newspaper journalism, collected in two volumes published by John Macrone in February and November 1836, with illustrations by George Cruikshank, and nearly titled "Bubbles from the Brain of Boz and the Graver of Cruikshank", Sketches by Boz is the public record of Dickens's apprenticeship. The early pieces, as he later pointed out, "comprise my first attempts at authorship". By the time of "Vauxhall Gardens by Day", written in October 1836, The Pickwick Papers had reached its eighth number and a meteoric career had taken flight.

Read in the order they were written, the Sketches consequently give off the terrific air of a newly minted talent discovering what it can do. While the opening tranche of "tales" derive from the work of forgotten contemporary humorists, the pieces of London reportage that he began to contribute to the Morning Chronicle in autumn 1834 ("Gin Shops", "Shabby-Genteel People", "The Pawnbroker's Shop") are like nothing else in pre-Victorian journalism: bantering and hard-headed by turns, hectic and profuse, falling over themselves to convey every last detail of the metropolitan front-line from which Dickens sent back his dispatches.

As he itemises the contents of the pawnbroker's shop ("a few old China cups; some modern vases, adorned with paltry paintings of three Spanish cavaliers playing three Spanish guitars; or a party of boors carousing: each boor with one leg painfully elevated in the air by way of expressing his perfect freedom and gaiety �") you sense that Dickens barely knows how to stop. It is the same with Miss Amelia Martin in "The Milliner's Mishap", eyeing up her friend's wedding breakfast ("pewter-pots at the corners; pepper, mustard and vinegar in the centre; vegetables on the floor") � a world so vivid and variegated to the person writing about it that there is almost too much to set down.

By the time of the final sketches ("Our Next Door Neighbours", "The Tuggses at Ramsgate") Dickens had begun to stake out the lower-middle-class interiors that critics were already marking down as his special subject. Meanwhile an admiring gang of early Victorian novelists stood ready to take their cue. Reading "Shabby-Genteel People", for example, one can almost see Thackeray (who shortly afterwards was to write his own shabby genteel story) making notes in the background.

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'Novelists ought to try to see the people in history on their own terms'

The first mock-Victorian novel I ever came across was John Fowles's (1969) � advance warning of the gathering postmodern tidal wave that would leave the historical fiction of the 1970s and 1980s looking very different to the more conventional structures that had preceded it. Aged 17, I found the book intoxicating, with its sex and its tricksy omniscience, but this trail-blazer from the Age of Aquarius soon lost its sheen. Like Lytton Strachey half a century before, Fowles, it seemed to me, patronised the Victorians; he took them out into the book-lined study of his mind and gently reminded them that they had never read Freud, and the knowingness that takes in everything from Victorian morals to Victorian furniture becomes rather wearisome. A character can scarcely blow his nose without Fowles giving us a lecture on conditions in the Salford handkerchief factories. All this inspired in me a conviction that novelists ought to try to see the people in history on their own terms, rather than with the benefit of hindsight.

But why write historical fiction in the first place? What's wrong with the here and now? Every so often � most notably when Hilary Mantel's won the 2009 Man Booker � literary journalists take to the books pages to suggest that contemporary reality is simply too complex for its potential anatomists to get their heads round. Most writers, the argument runs, are to some degree interested in power, its origins, expression and consolidation. As for power in the early 21st century, who can say where it lies?

There is something in this explanation � , for example, might be conducted in a fog of obfuscation, but at least one knows who owns the turf its characters tread. At the same time it ignores another of novel-writing's elemental drivers: money. "I'm going to write a novel," I remember telling my editor, back in the early 2000s. "It can either be another one about deracinated provincial types" (there had already been five of these, none of them remarkably successful), "or that Victorian one I've always fancied a go at." "Do the Victorian one," Alison counselled, almost before the words had left my mouth.

I did the Victorian one: (2006), which, although a relatively modest performer on the scale of publishing megabucks, sold five times as many copies as any previous outing to which I had put my hand. It was also an exhilarating experience to write, offering a form � the "Victorian mystery" of Wilkie Collins and co � that allowed for a wide range of styles and treatments, numberless "Victorian voices" from Gissing and Trollope to rural obscurities such as Mary Mann, and a heroine whose vocal tone I borrowed from the journals of . There was even the sense that one was writing a kind of disguised literary criticism, sending up the preoccupations of the Victorian novel, its periodic bouts of archness, its moralising and its class consciousness, even as one was addressing them. Then there was the fact that if you wrote about financial chicanery and skulduggery in Gladstone-era EC2, critics automatically assumed that you had an allegorical eye trained on modern-day Threadneedle Street. Almost without trying, it seemed, you could be defiantly old-fashioned and thoroughly up-to-date.

Coming to write Derby Day, to which Kept is in some sense a prequel, five years later, I discovered that this near-virgin territory had been briskly professionalised. There are now specialist journals devoted to something called "neo-Victorian literature", MA courses at the universities of Hull and Liverpool, and a shelf-full of set texts including AS Byatt's , Sarah Waters's , Michel Faber's and the late Michael Cox's . All this is very gratifying, but simultaneously constraining, as it conveys the feeling of a once unsullied beach leading down to bright, pristine water, now stalked by well-meaning but officious lifeguards.

Derby Day's inspiration was, inevitably, WP Frith's panoramic painting of the same name (in fact the full title is ) first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858. The Victorians, to the dismay of one or two of their aesthetically-minded art critics, liked a painting to "tell a story", and Frith's rendition of the Epsom concourse is crammed with individual narratives: the aristocratic roué's mistress sitting forlornly in her carriage; the disbelieving teenage boy who has just been rooked at thimblerig; the tumbling acrobats. It occurred to me that here, essentially, was an illustration to a novel that had not yet been written, like (if on a smaller scale) a Thackeray sketch for a chapter of that had never made it on to the page.

Much of the academic interest in "neo-Victorian literature" has to do with its use of idiom. Novels set in the 19th century that use its language and narrative conventions are generally filed under "pastiche". Certainly Derby Day is forever doffing its cap to the spectres of the past. Captain McTurk, its punctilious detective, may very well have wandered in from . Thackeray's Captain Rook and Mr Pigeon turn up in the climactic race-day scenes. The fictitious "Shepherd's Inn", near Chancery Lane, is robbed wholesale from . There are even nods to Frith's own Derby Day recce of 1854, in particular the ruined gambler he witnessed trying to cut his throat in a refreshment tent.

The idea, on the other hand, was to use these expropriations to create a narrative voice that, while plausibly Victorian, could not be traced back to a single source: a "lost" Victorian novel that could have been written in 1868 by an author that Thackeray, Dickens and co never knew. All this is nonsense, of course, as any book written a century and a half after the age it describes will betray its provenance a dozen times a chapter. But at least there are no lectures on handkerchiefs.

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Both the story of William Powell Frith's life and his art had strong affinities with the literature of the day, and behind the realism of his paintings lies a moral undertone reminiscent of Dickens

Of all the Victorian artists, William Powell Frith (1819-1909) is the one who most resembles a character from a Victorian novel. Etty spent seven years as a printer's devil; Turner's early life with his wig-maker father in Maiden Lane sounds like a cancelled chapter from The Old Curiosity Shop, but somehow it is the creator of Ramsgate Sands in whom the twin streams of Victorian art and Victorian literature most narrowly converge. There is the (relatively) humble background � Frith senior was a Harrogate inn-keeper � and the unabashed delight in celebrity and the high-powered socialising that went with it. Above all � a vital component of the Victorian jigsaw � there is that sense of secretiveness. In time-honoured sensation-novel fashion, Frith maintained a second family, of whose existence his wife became aware only when she caught her husband � supposedly in Brighton � posting a letter three streets away.

One always expects a steely juvenile resolve from the biographies of Victorian painters. Frith, however, seems scarcely to have wanted to become an artist in the first place. His original scheme was to be an auctioneer, and it was only when his talent-spotting father dragged him off to London and advertised his sketches to a pair of Academicians that he got the bit between his teeth. There followed a somewhat tedious apprenticeship at the Charlotte Street art school run by Henry Sass ("Gandish's Academy" in Thackeray's The Newcomes), but by the early 1840s, still barely out of his teens, he was luxuriating in his first Academy success � a subject from The Vicar of Wakefield that went for 100 guineas � and an order from Dickens for portraits of Kate Nickleby and Barnaby Rudge's Dolly Varden. A sharp operator, even in his apprentice days, Frith recognised the symbolic significance of the Dickens commission: he and his mother are supposed to have burst into tears on receipt of the letter.

If the 1840s was a good time to be a novelist, then, in certain respects, it was an even better time to be a painter. From an early stage in his career, Frith was able to benefit from the two great professionalising tendencies of Victorian art. The first was the enormous sums of money that could now be made out of a vocation that had previously got by on shabby gentility. The Railway Station, from 1861, was sold to the celebrated London dealer Louis Victor Flatow for 8,800 guineas, with a 750 guinea bonus for keeping it out of the Royal Academy exhibition; 83,000 people subsequently trooped through Flatow's gallery to inspect it. The second � closely connected to the first � was the rising social status of the artist. "The Artists" of Thackeray's knowing sketch of 1840 are down-at-heel bohemians, the steps of whose Soho ateliers resound to the tread of duns and potboys � the greatest insult flung at Vanity Fair's Becky Sharp, after all, is that her father was a drawing-master. But the sanitising process that picked up Dickens and Thackeray and deposited them in noblemen's drawing- rooms, brought them to Holland House salons and the terraces of country estates quickly extended to the art world. Frith was taken up by royalty and invited to paint the marriage of the Prince of Wales, but not the least of his achievements was to marry one of his daughters off to the celebrated Victorian medic Sir George Hastings.

If all this sounds like a very minor variation on the standard Victorian principle of self-help, with easel and oil paint taking the place of railway shares or discounted bills, then Frith would have been the first to admit his materialism. His attitude to his art was straightforwardly mercenary. "I know very well that I never was, nor under any circumstances could have become, a great artist," he maintained, "but I am a very successful one." But if at one level he was an all-too-pliable opportunist, quite happy, during his reputation-forging 20s to churn out the historical panoramas or scenes from Goldsmith that the early-Victorian public � and the early-Victorian art critic � demanded, then, at another, he was profoundly irritated by some of the constraints that it placed on his imagination.

Here, too, he was helped by a development in the wider landscape. This was the art world's increasing tolerance of a straightforwardly representative treatment of contemporary subjects. Ramsgate Sands, a sensation at the Royal Academy summer show of 1854, laid the foundation stone of Frith's commercial success � it was sold to a London dealer for 1,000 guineas and later bought by Queen Victoria � but it also established him as a technical innovator. As the art historian Christopher Wood points out, his vista of Victorian ladies at the beach is the first attempt to paint large numbers of people in modern dress, predating Manet by 10 years and Degas, Renoir and Caillebotte by nearly 20.

To the novelist � as opposed to the art critic � Frith's fascination lies in his closeness to the literature of his day, the sense that what the viewer is examining is not so much a painting as a wide-angle illustration to a book that has not yet been written. In this he is thoroughly representative of one of the great aesthetic tendencies of his age. The boundary between early-Victorian art and early-Victorian literature is blurred to the point where it sometimes seems hardly to exist at all. It was not merely that most novels were issued in illustrated, serial form, but that a significant fraction of novelists were keen to maintain a presence in both camps. Thackeray, to take the most obvious example, originally fancied himself as an artist � his introduction to Dickens came when he offered himself as a replacement for Seymour, The Pickwick Papers' first illustrator � and much of his early work takes the form of "sketchbooks" in which the drawings are sometimes quite as important as the text that surrounds them. The original title of Vanity Fair was "Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society", and even though the book soon turned into a conventional novel, there is a constant reminder of its visual dynamics in Thackeray's illustrations, many of which improve on the plot by adding odd bits of symbolism, choice allusions that bring out the significance of what may only be implicit in the prose itself.

If Thackeray uses his artistic skills to irradiate his literary work, then Frith, it might be said, plays the trick in reverse by carrying the techniques of literature over into his art. From one angle, this was simply a matter of ballast, and the wholesale importation from books and magazines of the kind of people with whom he populated his pictures. One of his great friends, for example, was the Punch artist John Leech, whose "social types" became a staple of his paintings. It involved both the use of interior narrative, and the well-worked profusion of his backdrops, which are as heroically cluttered and faithfully rendered as any Dickensian stage set: "I put no trust in fancy for the smallest detail of the picture," he once declared. All these tendencies come together in The Derby Day, sent to the Royal Academy at the end of April 1858 in time for its private view of 2 May. "Opening day of the Exhibition," the artist noted in his diary shortly afterwards. "Never was such a crowd seen around a picture. The secretary obliged to get a policeman to keep the people off."

Frith had first visited the Epsom turf two years previously, less interested in the race itself than the off-course antics of the acrobats and the fortune-tellers, nearly getting swindled by a thimble-rigging gang fronted by a bogus clergyman (all these figures appear on the canvas) and watching a ruined gambler attempting to cut his throat in one of the refreshment tents. Although he made rough drawings of the composition, he admitted that he "had difficulty in composing great numbers of figures into a more or less harmonious whole". The Derby Day, consequently, involves a number of different techniques. Its basis � something Victorian painters tended to keep quiet about � is a series of photographs taken by his friend Robert Howlett. Its figures � all 88 of them � are not the racegoers he had seen at Epsom two years before but models brought to his studio in Pembridge Villas and painted in threes, or even portraits of friends: the man in the fez standing behind the policeman is modelled on his deranged fellow artist Richard Dadd, already in prison for the murder of his father.

The picture is, in effect, a series of individual stories: the thimble-riggers clustered to the left of the pop-eyed boy who has clearly just been fleeced by them; the aristocratic roué lounging by his mistress's carriage; the two gentlemanly exquisites paying languid court to a brace of racecard-toting young ladies. Frith's genius lies in what he sees, but also in what he does not, or chooses not to see, in what he puts in and also what he leaves out, and the result is both an impossibly detailed panorama and also an impression, where the viewer, apparently shown everything, still wants to know more.

Critics diagnosed works of scrupulous realism: "just the right classes which may be seen at our chief railway stations," the Era observed of The Railway Station, "and every one of them extraordinarily true to life." But Frith was never a realist in the strict sense: ultimately his approach is as devious and selective as any 1880s aesthetician. One sees this most obviously in his cast of characters, who, however sharply drawn, are always carefully calibrated to the public's expectations of them. The Victorian art fanciers who stood in front of The Derby Day saw, in the end, what they thought they ought to see. As a piece of art, the painting is a gigantic paradox: full of individual life and vigour, oddly static when seen in the round. But Ruskin, who reckoned it "a kind of cross between John Leech and Wilkie, with a dash of daguerreotype here and there, and some pretty seasoning with Dickens' sentiment", was absolutely right. No Victorian artist quite so successfully incorporated the tricks of narrative into his paintings, or knew what his audience wanted from both art and the life they saw reflected in it.

DJ Taylor's novel Derby Day is published by Chatto & Windus.

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DJ Taylor admires a historical novel with little interest in history

The curious thing about Robert Edric's historical novels is how un- or even anti-historical they are. Most writers, set to work on the London pornography trade of the 1890s, would be falling over themselves to offer lubricious details from late-Victorian gazetteers, but apart from a glance or two at hansom cabs, gas-jet lighting and Ellen Terry-era dress styles, The London Satyr could have been set virtually anywhere. Sir Henry Irving gets several walk-ons, and there is a pointed little role for his theatrical sidekick Bram Stoker, but in general the period garnish is kept resolutely at bay.

Fans of Edric's compendious back-catalogue � this is his 20th novel to add to the brace written under his given name of GE Armitage � will be familiar with this situational imprecision, the sense of everything taking place on a revolving stage on which the costumes may change but theme and dialogue remain ominously the same. They will also cast a knowing eye on his photographer hero, Charles Webster, one of those quintessential Edric types anonymously at large in a landscape full of people he doesn't much like, whose instinct for self-preservation is forever undermined by information dangled an inch or two beyond his grasp.

Like Quinn, the wary frontman of 2010's , Webster is trapped. Anxious to supplement the meagre wages on offer at Irving's Lyceum Theatre, he has fallen in with a more than usually creepy denizen of the fin-de-siècle skin-trade named Marlow, to whom he supplies costumes for hardcore tableaux vivants. To Stoker's perpetual nagging over discrepancies in the stockroom can now be added a fully-fledged scandal: the murder of a child prostitute by one of Marlow's cronies, and a chain of incidental connection that goes all the way back to Irving himself.

Meanwhile Webster has an increasingly problematic homelife to negotiate, dominated by his wife's burgeoning career as a medium. The link between study and office is supplied by Isobel, the conniving parlour-maid, and her discovery of some compromising photographs. It is here, amid the ectoplasm and the tapping of bogus spirit hands, that Edric's relative lack of interest in his milieu starts to show. "It's all a part of my new role," his daughter explains, as a prelude to talk of "empowerment" and "empathising". In a historical novel that took its stand on the barricade of authenticity, these anachronisms would jar. In Edricville, on the other hand, the reader accepts them as a price worth paying for the series of psychological jousting matches into which each of his books eventually mutates.

The suspicion that this is not just an Edric novel, but the Edric novel, marginally refined, grows even stronger in the finale. Here, as the net wielded by the London Vigilance Committee spreads out to catch practically everyone but the absconding Marlow, character and setting gradually recede and all that remains is the usual file of stark and uneasy conversations involving people engaged in the hopeless task of trying to separate enemies from allies, only to discover that the separation can't usefully be made.

Subtle touches abound, and there are several delicately written setpieces. But anyone expecting a variation on Michel Faber's should be warned that this � sharply written, wholly engrossing and a memorable addition to the Edric canon � is not it.

DJ Taylor's At the Chime of a City Clock is published by Constable.

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Parliament voted on the future of tuition fees: one vote for an upper limit of £9,000 a year and a second vote for fees at least £6,000 a year. Get all the votes by MPs as they are published

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The future of tuition fees was decided today. The result of the ballot was 323 in favour and 302 against, this was both for an average £6,000 a year and to tripple the existing upper limit to £9,000 in "exceptional" circumstances.

Of the 57 Liberal Democrat MPs involved today, 28 voted for the fees 21 voted against eight abstained.

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In the week of the Pope's visit, DJ Taylor reflects on the tradition of the 'Catholic novel', from moralistic Victorian tracts, to Waugh, Greene and Spark, and contemporary writers David Lodge and Hilary Mantel

As the nation's 5.5 million Catholics braced themselves (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI, last week's Tablet offered a hot 100 of the lay-people who "put Catholicism at the heart of public life". Politicians and philanthropists abounded, but there was also a gratifyingly large contingent of writers � at least 10, if you count the various ramifications of the Pakenham family � ranging from last year's Booker winner, Hilary Mantel, to the recent convert Paul Bailey. Naturally, some distinctions need to be made. Hardly anyone here could properly be described as a "Catholic novelist": the majority were simply Catholics who had written novels, or, like Mark Lawson, noted that much of what they wrote had been shaped by a religious education. All the same, the presence on the list of writers as varied in their tastes and affiliations as David Lodge, Rachel Cusk and Julian Fellowes suggests that the Catholic tradition in English letters is alive and kicking.

Why should the entity known as the "Catholic novel" occupy such an outsize space in domestic literary life? It is not enough to suggest, as George Orwell once put it, that the conflict between this world and the next is a fruitful theme that the ordinary unbelieving writer can't make use of. Rather, it derives from Catholicism's status as a minority and occasionally a pariah religion, keen on a kind of proselytising that the Anglican church rarely likes to engage in. The earliest "Catholic novels", born out of the mid-19th-century Tractarian movement, tend to be straightforward toeings of the party line: Newman's Loss and Gain (1848), for example, written shortly after his departure to Rome, or Callista (1855), a defiantly propagandist work set in third-century Greece in which a beautiful Christian sculptress is tortured on the rack, dies for her faith, but has a portion of her remains spirited away for use as a holy relic.

We like our literary heroes to be consistent but, as the relevations about Ryszard Kapuscinski show, it's not that simple.

Pole apart: the late Ryszard Kapuscinski in Warsaw, in 2003. Photograph: STR/AFP.

The posthumously "outed" literary titan, whom investigation shows to have had a sexual or political orientation markedly different from the one touted in public, is one of the most regular sights of modern artistic life. Consequently the allegations in the current edition of that the celebrated Polish journalist was a communist who throughout the 1960s and 1970s worked as a government spy in return for trips abroad, will surprise no one who takes in an interest in the vexed question of the writer's relationship with the state.