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But Baboneau is a highly-rated editor who has helped create a number of silk purses. Perhaps Philip Dunne, chairman of Ottakar’s and the newly-elected Tory MP for Ludlow, will ensure that his shops get behind the novel next autumn.
* REad, an Ottakar’s-sponsored book strand of the Salisbury Internatioanl Arts Festival, runs from 29 May until 11 June. Alexander McCall Smith kicks off at the Salisbury Playhouse; among other highlights are Michael Palin and Patrick French in conversation, Louis de Berni?s – talking to Boyd Tonkin – and an Iraq war discussion between Colonel Tim Collins and Kate Adie (both on 5 June). He grasps, and shares, the value of living as an autonomous individual sustained by liberty and law, “in peace and free from serious violence and fear” He also knows how rare this is. So Letters to Lily might best be enjoyed as a microscope-work dressed up as a telescope-work. This book about English culture arrives half-disguised as a book about the world How typically English, some might say..

He blends some gentle leg-pulling with a proper historical respect for the “English exception” and its role in forging modern life.In philosophical terms, Macfarlane is leagues away from being a “relativist”: that bugbear of Bavarian popes and Oxford dons. Time and again, Macfarlane embarks like a super-erudite Bilbo Baggins on an epic intellectual hike across the earth, only to revert to the odd habits of his English Shire – a place, like Darwin’s Galapagos islands, “where strange creatures have developed because of their partial isolation”. It constantly highlights the way modern culture reaches us through the “narrow funnel” of a peculiar language, history and set of traditions. Of course, Stephen Hawking pioneered the mighty miniature, his Brief History of Time followed a decade later by Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything. Laconic thinkers such as Alain de Botton and A C Grayling have delivered the condensed milk of humankindness in modest packages. Within the next couple of weeks, John Carey will tell us What Good Are The Arts? in 250 pages while the philosopher Simon Blackburn gives his summary verdict on Truth.It hardly calls for a metaphysician to work out that there might be some dialectical connection between the microscopic and telescopic genres.

After all, Hawking-style pop cosmology saw the universe in a grain of sand – or rather, in the few nano-seconds of the Big Bang. Micro-histories, meanwhile, find the germ of cultures and eras in compact events. Conversely, wide-screen surveys of art and thought often reveal something very specific about the people, and the places, that attempt them. However big your story, you can only ever tell it from a single patch of ground.

Ubiquity, like omniscience, is not a human trait.Take Letters to Lily: on how the world works (Profile, £14.99), a sweeping tour d’horizon by the anthropologist Alan Macfarlane. Addressed to his seven-year-old granddaughter, but meant for her future teenage self, these 30 missives offer a pack of deep-thinking, wide-ranging essays on identity and society couched in simple, sturdy prose.Like other short-haul sages, Macfarlane seeks to distil the fruits of a lifetime’s reading and research. Selfhood, love, nationality, war, faith, science, family, freedom: he takes a comparative approach to the kind of “big words” that so alarmed Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. Macfarlane roots them in charmingly precise details, from the role of glass and tea in changing history, and the customs of the Nepalese villages where he does fieldwork, to proof that “magic is alive and well” in the cult of Disneyland and Harry Potter.However, this affable analysis turns – perhaps inadvertently – into a book about Englishness (not Britishness). Today’s publishers and authors tend to prefer it either enormous – or tiny.

Size does matter, at least in the choice of a theme for non-fiction. I don’t always succeed but I myself try to bring morality more to the front stage of my writing.” The task, he says is not necessarily “to give the answers but at least to ask the questions.” It’s what makes Yehoshua’s fiction as challenging as it is – consistently – absorbing.Biography: L A B YehoshuaAvraham B Yehoshua was born in 1936 in Jerusalem, where his Sephardic family had lived for five generations. He studied at the Hebrew University, and taught at school and university level In the 1960s, he lived in Paris for four years. His fictional debut, Death of the Old Man, came in 1962; later novels include The Lover (1977), Five Seasons (1987), Mr Mani (1990), Journey to the End of the Millennium (1999), The Liberated Bride (2001) and The Mission of the Human-Resource Man (2004) His fiction is published in the UK by Peter Halban. At one extreme, historians and critics have taken to worshipping the god of small things.