A Watch in the Night

The Lampitt Chronicles #5

by A.N. Wilson

An aging man is watching Shakespeare on television in the setting of a modest suburban house. Do not be deceived by the simplicity of such an image. For the man is Julian Ramsay, biographer of the literary Lampitt dynasty, and the famous black actress playing Margaret of Anjou was once, perhaps, the love of his life.
Julian's mind wanders to a night that began with making love to the young and gorgeous Dodie and ended in the small hours of the morning outside the flat where James Petworth Lampitt lived and died. This is the story of that one evening, in the course of which Julian journeys from London's high society to its low life, meets many characters from his past, revisits memories, and, at last, unravels the mysteries of the two violent deaths that dominate the Lampitt Chronicles.

Genres: Fiction

228 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Andrew Norman Wilson is an English writer and newspaper columnist, known for his critical biographies, novels, works of popular history and religious views. He is an occasional columnist for the Daily Mail and former columnist for the London Evening Standard, and has been an occasional contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer.

Reviews

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved this passage about the narrator's love of detective novels:

" ... Most nights close for me at two a.m., with a few more murders solved. (I don't like the ones in which there is no solution.) Well, perhaps the Dame is right, and I should be better employed reading all those great books by Dante or Balzac or Cicero that I've never got round to, but the truth is that I never will; my reading habits are just that - habits. Books are now a narcotic for me, not vehicles for self-improvement ..."

Books can sometimes offer up the most personal truths.

[Timothy Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed re-reading this final volume ( immediately after its predecessor, Hearing Voices ) of The Lampitt papers sequence of novels, over 25 years after I first read them, although they're not as good as the first 3. i'd love to see them televised but they're probably a bit too niche. A good story of (mostly ) London literary life, well-written. Can there be a heterosexual novelist as good as describing gay life and characters as Wilson ? He is obsessed with the use of the inverted comma throughout this and others of his novels. A minor point but I think it's overdone at times.

[Graham Robertson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disappointing.