Well I'm not really, but there are two books that I'm eager to read, & they won't be published until then. One is A.S.Byatt's "The Children's Book", set in Edwardian England, with a central character based on the children's author E. Nesbit, and described by Sam Leith in The Guardian as her "Middlemarch". The other is "Family Britain, 1951-1957" by David Kynaston, the second volume of his social history of Britain from the end of World War II to the election of Margaret Thatcher. The first volume, "Austerity Britain", was the best thing I've read in a long time - brilliantly informative & entertaining - a perfect layman's history. They're both nice, hefty volumes too - 600-700 pages apiece.
If you see any photographs of Byatt these days, you'll see that she seems to look slightly like Francis Bacon. Or am I imagining things?
