A Princeton-educated WASP of the old school, John Hopkins mostly writes novels, but The Tangier Diaries 1962–1979, published in 1998, is probably his best-known work. Otherwise his books are more highly praised, and sell better, in France than here in his adopted homeland. So what of this latest volume? It is presented as a kind of sequel to the earlier Diaries, though it records a journey straddling 1972–3 – an interlude, in other words, in the Tangier years.

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