Charles Nicholl

The old fortress city of Mandu stands high on a rocky plateau above the plains of central India. It is entered from the north; after a tortuous dusty ascent from Dhar, the road squeezes between two stone bastions and enters through the Delhi Darwaza, or Delhi Gate, where the remains of inset blue enamel can be seen on the dilapidated sandstone archways. Up this road and through this gate, on a day in late August or early September 1617, came the eccentric English author, polyglot and traveller Thomas Coryate. He was a smallish, bearded man with a long, rather lugubrious face – ‘the shape of his head’, according to one description, was ‘like a sugar-loaf inverted, with the little end before’. He wore simple native clothes, and was thin to the point of emaciation. He had travelled down from the city of Agra, four hundred miles to the north, and it is a fairly safe bet that he had done so on foot.’‘

Beatrice Cenci was – to take a sample of sound-bites over the centuries – a ‘goddess of beauty’, a ‘fallen angel’, a ‘most pure damsel’. She was also a convicted murderer. This is a charismatic combination, not least here in Italy, and her name has lived on, especially in Rome, where she was born and where she was executed in 1599.’‘

The files of the Elizabethan intelligence service are a rich and oddly neglected source: rich in historical detail, in the surprising appearance of famous names, in the whole tawdry but fascinating psychology of the spying game. There is in them a curious sense of déjà vu. Under the directorship of Sir Francis Walsingham, the security services featured much the same cast of moles, buggers, double agents and dirty tricksters that has entertained us in more recent spy ‘scandals’. The technology has improved – in Walsingham’s day, the fastest intelligence could travel was the speed of a horse – and the targets have different names, but the methods and motives of the secret world have not really changed.’’

Julian Barnes is a writer of rare intelligence. He catches the detail of contemporary life with an uncanny, forensic skill. His style is a model of cool and precision. He is often very funny, and if his humour tends somewhat to jokiness, then at least the jokes are good ones. At his best – in Flaubert’s Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters – he uses his skills as a literary entertainer to put across complex, resonant ideas.’

Marlowe’s Dr Faustus was an Elizabethan spine-chiller. People came for thrills, and early productions pulled out all the stops to provide them. ‘Shagge-hayred devills’ ran ‘roaring over the stage with squibs in their mouthes’. Drummers thundered backstage. Stage-hands hung aloft to ‘make artificiall lightning in their heavens’. At times the play seemed to generate a power more than dramatic. At one performance in Shoreditch the wooden walls of the theatre suddenly ‘crackt’ and ‘frighted the audience.’ At another, in Exeter, the players stopped dead in the middle of the conjuration scene, ‘for they were all perswaded there was one devell too many amongst them.’ They explained the situation to the audience, and said they ‘could go no further with this matter’. The audience promptly fled – ‘every man hastened to be first out of dores’ – and the players spent the night in unaccustomed prayer and meditation.’