![]() Dense, allusive, with all kinds of buried sub-texts poking up from beneath its surface, Vansittart's work often seems to operate by way of a series of barely recognisable codes, a view of history so thronged with detail that it practically needs foot-noting. ![]() Then there is the rapt cosmopolitanism of the gaze: not westward across the Atlantic, but back into the heart of an old Europe which, for all the anaesthetising effect of post-war politics, still seems very much alive. For a start, there is the sense of a ferocious intellect burning unappeasably away, writing exactly what it likes without giving a damn about the Waterstone's buyer or the prize jury. ![]() ![]() To anyone raised on the McEwan-and-water orthodoxies of contemporary British fiction, the view from Vansittart's Mount Olympus can be a bracing experience. ![]()
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