You can guess from the weight of William Boyd’s seventeenth novel that it is going to be one of his cradle-to-grave books, showing how history affects the fate of the protagonist (and, occasionally, how the protagonist affects history) throughout the course of a long life. These ‘whole-life novels’, as Boyd calls them, constitute only one part of a hugely varied body of fiction – there is a marked contrast between these maximalist, action-packed books and, say, the intimate, Chekhovian comedy of his last novel, Trio – but one could say they are his speciality.

He may be unique in this; indeed it is odd, when you consider how many works of fiction in general are cast as journals or memoirs, how relatively few cradle-to-grave novels there are. Certainly, such books, when they do appear, always receive points for effort: Ian McEwan’s recent Lessons, an account of seventy years in the life of one man, has been hailed as his most ambitious novel in years.

One of the things that struck me about McEwan’s novel is that, despite occupying what looks like Boydian territory, it is in fact highly un-Boydian, with its hero leading a fairly ordinary and seemingly unfulfilling life. By contrast, the life of Cashel Greville Ross (1799–1882), hero of The Romantic, is as full of unusual incident as those of John James Todd (in Boyd’s The New Confessions), Logan Mountstuart (in Any Human Heart) and Amory Clay (in Sweet Caress).

Ross’s adventures span four continents and encompass whooping it up with Byron and the Shelleys in Italy, becoming England’s bestselling author, introducing lager to the United States and discovering the source of the Nile a year before Sir Richard Burton’s own expedition set off. There is, in other