Hewison demonstrates how literature departments in universities, based around close study of the text -FR Leavis and TS Eliot, all those stern initials – were first infiltrated and then replaced by social scientists, culture boffins with an agenda. The Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies stole the heat from Oxbridge. Media studies and cultural history modules mushroomed, inspired by Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, by the structuralists and the deconstructors. A vast machinery for the rigorous discussion of culture came into being at the very moment when there was no culture left beyond untrustworthy signs in the sand, scraps of forgotten doctrine, quotations, atomisations, parodies and thefts. Certain books – Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media – announced themselves only to feature as elements on a Sussex University reading list. There is a lost generation of ex-Liberal Studies bullshitters who still get the shakes at the memory of peddling this stuff to stupefied day-release motor mechanics.Robert Hewison guides us across the heavily-mined terrain, through all the great debates, the petty corruptions.

But it’s hard not to see his project as an epic edition of All Our Yesterdays – with erudite voice- over and gesticulating arms. Culture is represented by key images, icons for each era: Lord Clark of Civilisation, tailored to within an inch of his life, sniffling next to the Queen Mum, while Dame Myra Hess tinkles away on the ivories in the National Gallery. Schoolboys carrying small suitcases as they dutifully read the bumph about the Skylon at the Festival of Britain Union Jack bikinis in Carnaby Street. Lady Thatcher, bandaged like Lawrence of Arabia, in a Challenger tank.Such an approach inevitably declines into a frantic essay in cataloguing, lists of names that precis a period. “In the hands of writers like Julian Barnes, Peter Ackroyd and Martin Amis, the narrative assurance of the novel was broken up.. The conventional naturalism… was further disrupted by more cosmopolitan voices: Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro…” It isn’t even the choice of names that makes me uneasy, it’s the bureaucratic tone. Like one of those Arts Council reports or Booker speeches that try to include all the plucky losers.

Hewison practises consensus prose, committee language with no freaks or flaws. “Culture will not only celebrate, it should also question.” Unobjectionable sentiments, unobjectionably expressed.In the end I’m left grazing the Index; these names are all culture and no cult. I wouldn’t insist on another version entirely, but a book that prefers not to deal with any aspect of what the late Eric Mottram called “the English Poetry revival”, or with the upsurge of small-press publishing activity that evolved into the only language-sets sharp enough and crazy enough to deal with where we now find ourselves, is inadequate. The energy of urban lowlife narrative – Gerald Kersh, Jack Trevor Story, James Curtis, Alexander Baron – has also been left under the carpet.

For me, this rich mix of high and low, equally demented, equally estranged, is what forges a culture worthy of the name. And that’s the only consensus that matters, the consensus of one.. “My mother read a lot, sighed a lot, and went to bed early.” She is like Dr Weiss in A Start in Life, who “on certain evenings” lets the dusk gather in her small sitting-room and props her head on her hands, or like Harriet in A Family Romance, who feels “it might be pleasant simply to watch the world from my window.” These elegant, well provided for women, who long not so much for death as for silence, are under Brookner’s spell, and so, for the 15th time, are we. Maffy Harrison, the narrator of this new novel, is in search of her mother’s hidden past, the mother who sighed a lot. To help her she has only a notebook – the kind you you can get at any French stationer’s – with an unintelligible entry: “Dames blances La Gaillarderie Place des Ternes Sang.

Edward.”
Her mother had never explained herself, Maffy reflects, but muteness is in itself a kind of elegance. Her own account will have to be “a fabrication, one of those by which each of lives.” In all Brookner’s novels, the truth that matters most is the truth we tell to ourselves.Maffy’s mother, we discover, was Maud Harrison, nee Gonthier. The story is told from changing viewpoints – first from that of Nadine, Maud’s tough mother, then from that of Maud herself, growing up in Dijon in the Sixties, then from Edward Harrison’s, the weak creature she finally marries, but never from that of the destructively good-looking Tyler, the book’s dark “spoiler”. We get to know him only through his effect on less confident people.Edward wears a blazer and laced shoes. He is an innocent who would like “to exert his rights to full membership of the human race,” but hardly knows how to set about it. He was up at Cambridge with Tyler and became his friend, or rather his subordinate, more than a little in love with him.We’re not surprised when Edward, on what he’d thought of as a rather dashing visit to Paris, can find nothing to do but visit the Louvre and patrol the hard pavements round his borrowed room in the rue Laugier. Then the scene changes to La Gaillarderie, a small country house between Meaux and Melun, impeccably described with its charming 17th-century brick facade and its one erratic bathroom.