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“... there at his goal Dalrymple has forgotten his portentous mentor entirely, and quite right too. Jason Goodwin is another recent Cambridge graduate, and another traveller-on-a-pretext, and even more burdened with the learning of many historical archives. The Gunpowder Gardens is subtitled (a giveaway, all these subtitles, as guilty special ...”

“... Are there too many novels about missing Old Masters? Anyone who reads Jason Goodwin’s The Bellini Card might be forgiven for thinking so. It’s about a search for a portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror which was supposedly painted by Gentile Bellini during his visit to Istanbul in 1479. It relentlessly assembles all the standard fixtures and fittings of the sub-genre: exploitative forgers, dodgy art dealers, even dodgier descriptions of Venice, a blonde contessa who allows her hair to fall ‘in golden sheaves’ before she fences with our hero (who has the rare distinction of being an Ottoman eunuch detective, which alleviates the rich diet of cliché a little) and reveals that she has Something to Hide ...”

“... Spender was closely involved in manoeuvres within the British branch of the CCF to oust Michael Goodwin, the editor of Twentieth Century, a periodical that had already been covertly subsidised by the Americans to provide an alternative platform in Britain to the ‘pro-Soviet’ New Statesman. Stonor Saunders, whose book tells the story of CCF funding in ...”