by Paula Byrne (William Collins £25, 686pp)
Had Miss Marple been a novelist, she’d have been Barbara Pym. Both possessed a beady-eye for vicars wearing bicycle clips and enjoyed a glass of sherry.
Nothing was more exciting than ‘knitting a green jumper’, purchasing a bedspread, attending the parish jumble sale, sewing stockings for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force or hearing the bells announce Evensong on a misty autumn night.
Pym was also a shameless snoop. Jilted by future MP Julian Amery, she concealed herself outside his house in Belgravia, peering through the window at him. But she kept watch on her neighbours and perfect strangers, too, compiling what her biographer Paula Byrne calls ‘an exhaustive log of their comings and goings’. One person she even stalked to a private hotel in the West Country.