Vladimir Nabokov said that it was 'childish' to read novels for information about society. In the same context (the Afterword to Lolita) he also wrote that 'reality' was 'one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes'. Such scepticism about the capacity of fiction to report on the world is still very fashionable, and in that sense Norman Gash's book on Robert Surtees goes against the grain of present-day literary analysis.

LRB 9 June 1994 | PDF Download