Any writer who, midway through his publishing career, makes his way to Hell, the straight way of his life having been lost, must go there in the footsteps of Dante Alighieri and his man Virgil.  I first read Inferno on the balcony of my room at the Metropole Hotel in Saigon in 1971.  It was the splendidly odd translation of Dorothy Sayers, appropriate, I thought, since she commenced it underground during the Blitz.  The horizon before me at night crackled in that season, and it was hard to...