On the aeroplane I was able to finish reading Giles Waterfield’s admirable and complicated new novel in proof (it’s not published till April) about a family whose daughter, Irene, marries a German (or Prussian) architect before the first world war and the effect of the first world war on all their lives, particularly on attitudes to Germany.   Like a grand social novel of the nineteenth century, it deals with a number of social issues, including
homosexuality between the wars, the politics of German design, and the social origins of Nazism.   It tells one a lot about the history of the period, is extremely well written and clever.