Tibor Fischer has long been known for his absurdist black comedy, but in his new novel, Good to be God, the bleakness threatens to overwhelm the humour. Its narrator, Tyndale Corbett, opens his story in a state of near clinical depression and the moral musings on human selfishness which punctuate his subsequent picaresque adventures sink at times to levels of such bitterness as to compromise even the most robust reader’s will to live.

Good to be God
Tibor Fischer; Alma Books, 288 pp, £14.99

"Normally,” wrote Susan Sontag in her essay on The Pornographic Imagination, “we don’t experience, at least don’t want to experience, our sexual fulfilment as distinct from or opposed to our personal fulfilment. But perhaps in part they are distinct, whether we like it or not.” Howard Jacobson’s latest novel, The Act of Love, has as its protagonist Felix Quinn, a man who finds both agony and ecstasy in insisting on the distinction between his sexual and personal fulfilment.

Sontag remarked in the same essay that “sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness”. Jacobson, whose literary interest in the demonic nature of sexuality is intense – even if his treatment of the subject in earlier novels has tended towards the antic end of the demonic spectrum – undertakes in The Act of Love to anatomise the dire power of sexual love in the most refined and civilised of settings.

The Act of Love
Howard Jacobson; Jonathan Cape, 320 pp, £17.99

"On every generation to which it gave birth the French Revolution left its mark,” writes Robert Gildea at the beginning of this fine, wide-ranging survey of French political and cultural history after 1789. His aim is to account for the seemingly perpetual oscillation between the rival political orders of republic, monarchy and empire, from the end of the 18th century to the Great War.

Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914
Robert Gildea; Allen Lane, 560 pp, £30

AN Wilson is a literary phenomenon – novelist, biographer, essayist, journalist – polemical, prolific, erudite and entertaining. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of both high and low culture - as familiar with Simone Weil as he is with Fawlty Towers.

Wilson’s survey of Britannia triumphant, The Victorians, led on to After the Victorians, and now he gives us Our Times. The Age of Elizabeth II – a brilliant panorama of the past 55 years. For older readers it is good to be reminded of what they have lived through and what life was like in their youth; while younger readers will be incredulous that in their parents’ lifetime murderers were hanged, homo­sexuals were imprisoned, plays were censored and olive oil was only sold in tiny bottles as a remedy for earache.

Our Times. The Age of Elizabeth II
A.N. Wilson; Hutchinson, 496 pp, £25

It was at the beginning of the war that the two correspondents first crossed paths, at a regimental ball in Derbyshire. Patrick Leigh Fermor was a young officer in the Intelligence Corps and the ravishingly beautiful Deborah Mitford, aged 20 (the youngest of the Mitford sisters) had just become engaged to Lord Andrew Cavendish and had eyes for nobody else. “They seemed to be sleep-­dancing,” Leigh Fermor recalled, “utterly rapt, eyes shut as though in a trance.” She noticed him soon afterwards, however, at a fancy-dress party in London when he arrived costumed as a Roman gladiator armed with net and trident. But the real friendship began in 1954 when Deborah, now the Duchess of Devonshire, invited Leigh Fermor to stay at Lismore Castle in Ireland. By this time he had written two books and was a war hero, awarded the DSO for his leading role in capturing Heinrich Kreipe, the German commander in Crete, an extraordinarily daring exploit later written about and filmed.

In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor
Charlotte Mosely; John Murray, 416 pp, £25

"Follow the money.” The advice famously given to Bob Woodward and Carl Bern­stein seems to have been taken to heart by Alexander Waugh in this attractively written and diligently researched history of the Wittgenstein family.

The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War
Alexander Waugh; Bloomsbury, 384 pp, £20