‘For the Veronese, who put up with this Englishman for thirty years,’ reads the dedication to Tim Parks’s latest novel. It’s a line that might just as well refer to his protagonist, Morris Duckworth, as to the author himself: following Cara Massimina and Mimi’s Ghost, both published in the 1990s, Painting Death is Parks’s third novel to feature this blustering, bludgeoning Englishman, who has been bumping off the alta borghesia of fair Verona for several decades now.

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