From Evelyn Waugh to Virginia Woolf and Sally Rooney, these novels offer masterclasses in dialogue-driven narrative
For better or worse, I am a literary Anglophile. My mother was too. As a child I remember peeking over her shoulder at the novels she read after dinner: PG Wodehouse, Ngaio Marsh, all 12 volumes of Anthony Powell. It was with my mother that I first watched Upstairs, Downstairs — I was 10 at the time – and, through it, got an early glimpse of the house party, a phenomenon the sheer Britishness of which enraptured me.
In the sunny and freewheeling Palo Alto of the 1970s and 80s, I read about cold manor houses in which each of the 18 bedrooms had a different hand-blocked wallpaper. I read about midnight assignations in garden pergolas. I read breakfast scenes, billiard-room scenes, scenes in which fraught hostesses laboured over the seating arrangements for formal dinners.