ONE of the first characters to appear in Inferno is a spiky-haired, malevolent biker chick dressed in black leather.

IF AN aged, once-eminent author, close to the end, ekes out one almost-­certainly-last­ novel, and it’s of an indifferent standard, or worse, should it be ­published out of respect for his or her more glorious past?

A PUNCH cartoon, two dukes at a party, one whispering into the other’s ear: “Don’t you think it must be just terrible being an earl?”

OVER the years, Melvyn Bragg’s writing has attracted a degree of (jealous?) teasing, but the dissenting voices compete with a louder chorus of praise in which he is favourably compared with DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy.

Eighteen thirty-two used to be a well-known date in British history. It was the year of the Great Reform Bill, when an outdated political system gave way to a wider franchise allowing a number of middle-class men to vote for the first time. Antonia Fraser’s latest book is a spirited attempt to bring the controversy and passion of the era to a new audience.

SILA’S FORTUNE

A roundup of the latest book releases

Quickly described, Clever Girl, the new novel from Tessa Hadley, is the story of a woman’s life, from childhood to middle age. Like that John Lewis advert of a few years ago, it moves briskly through 50 years, touching down on experiences that will be very familiar to white, first-world women born during the second half of the 20th century.

In 1954, aged 14, Amos Klausner changed his name to Amos Oz, leaving behind him his home and father, exchanging city life for the relative privations of the desert, cutting his teeth (and his new identity) on life in an Israeli kibbutz.

With The Lion Rampant and its vivid, imaginative and blood-curdling account of Bannockburn, Robert Low, one assumes, has concluded in splendid bravura style, his sequence of novels on the Wars of Independence.

To my mind, China Miéville is one of the most interesting literary writers currently working in Britain, an accolade undiminished, though perhaps sometimes obscured, by his wholehearted commitment to genre.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind hails a biography of Thatcher that finally offers an authoritative voice on the woman behind the legacy

LOUISE Erdrich takes us back to the North Dakota Ojibwe reservation that she has conjured and mapped in so many of her novels and made as indelibly real as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Joyce’s Dublin.

A DEFTLY witty ­collection of letters from exasperated father Roger Mortimer to his wastrel son Charlie, Dear Lupin was one of the surprise hits of last year.

IN THIS fascinating rumination on the nature of courage and cowardice, there’s a chapter titled “Crime And Punishment” in which, among other things, Polly Morland has frank conversations with two armed robbers, now reformed.

WHEN Margaret Thatcher died, the nation broke satisfyingly into factions. Both clashing armies agreed that the lady with the handbag had been personally responsible, if not for everything, then for a prodigious number of things in Britain between 1979 and 1990.

They were, arguably, the first celebrity couple of the Jazz Era. She was a precocious, spoiled Southern belle and bad girl; he was a Midwesterner and Princeton dropout who had turned his experience into the novel This Side of Paradise.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical? This series of books, edited by William Irwin, laudably use popular culture to explain philosophical concepts.

There used to be a common complaint that the subject of the typical middle-class English novel was adultery in Hampstead or, perhaps, Islington. The charge was exaggerated of course; there was more variety in the English novel, even 40 years ago.

As German troops swept through Europe in 1940, it was reasonable to expect that the United Kingdom would be their next target. The main base of the British Home Fleet in Scapa Flow was, after all, only two hours’ flying time from Stavanger and the Nazi army was in Norway. Intelligence suggested that an invasion had already been planned.