Good Behaviour: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems (Virago Modern Classics)

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She is right, of course, but her assertion that ‘the heroine is also the narrator, yet has no idea what is going on’ seems wide of the mark.

A cowardly child was a hidden sore, and a child driven to admit hatred of his pony was something of a leper in our society. Diana Athill: Bad Behaviour is so clever, it’s mind-blowing…There are moments when the reader pauses to congratulate him or herself for being astute enough to twig what is really going on…It is as though we are seeing events unfold which we can then interpret for ourselves, and the effect of this is much more poignant than explication would be.

It’s an encounter with sexuality that (surely intentionally) fits the model of Freud’s case of the Wolf Man, whose dream of strange fox-sheep-wolf-like beings Freud construed as a nightmare version of the doggy-style sex the Wolf Man witnessed between his parents. Her most popular work, Songs of the Glens of Antrim (1901), a collection of slightly fey dialect poems, was much praised by the poet laureate, John Masefield, and set to music by the Irish composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Hamilton Harty.

He liked dressing up, too, but Mrs Brock felt that such games were not quite the thing for little boys.Aroon has been so isolated, kept in ignorance, that she knows nothing, perhaps refuses to know anything. I read Good Behaviour with the help of my friend, Canadian Reader and I think she would agree, that neither of us liked or felt an iota of sympathy for Aroon until we had finished the book and stepped away from its horrors. Mrs Brock is, naturally, immediately dismissed, and soon arrives in Ireland to corrupt the children at Temple Alice.