Tim Parks

There are references to sex in the book, but it is always disreputable, destructive sex. This is one of the things that must put a question mark over Les Misérables’s achievement: a narrative claiming to offer ‘the social and historical drama of the 19th century’, should surely have something to say about the impulse that was absolutely central not only to its author’s life, but to life in general. Sex never so much as occurs to Valjean, or indeed to those who adore him – this while Valjean’s creator was enjoying the charms of every chambermaid he could lay his hands on.

‘The good man’s​ home is a mask,’ Gustave Flaubert wrote when he was 16. Every ideal was a cover for vanity. How could it be otherwise, when our bodies were ‘composed of mud and shit and equipped with instincts lower than those of the pig, or the crab-louse’? Born in 1821 to a wealthy family and growing up in the cautious conservatism of provincial...

In the early 19th century, Leopardi would remark that the factional fragmentation of Italian society was such that no Italian past or present was ever entirely honoured or dishonoured ‘since there can be no honour without a shared sense of society’. Dante is the exception that proves the rule, more honoured it seems to me than any other Italian in history, perhaps because his great work so completely captures and in its way celebrates the endless divisiveness that unites Italy’s present with its past.

‘Most blessed Father,’ five international auditors wrote to Pope Francis on 27 June 2013, three months into his papacy, ‘there is an almost total lack of clarity in the accounts of both the Holy See and the Governorate.’ The letter goes on: ‘This lack of clarity makes it impossible to establish a proper estimate of the real financial position of the Vatican, whether as a whole or with regard to the single elements of which it is made up. It also means that no one can really consider themselves responsible for its financial management. All we know is that the data we examined indicates a seriously negative trend.’

Whenever​ we are in the company of J.M. Coetzee, whether it be an interview, a novel, a memoir or an essay, we are inexorably drawn into the realm of the ethical. We must judge and be judged, or at least strive to do the one and brace ourselves for the other. Hence a book titled The Good Story will not offer an analysis of the qualities that make for a satisfying reading experience, but...