Conflict couched in dark romance

which continued after the war, attracting foreigners like Picasso, Giacometti, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer. African-Americans James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Miles Davis also found Paris a congenial place. Agnes Poirier captures the shabby glamour of the era, relating the eccentricities, turbulent relationships, affairs and drug addictions of these free spirits, but she has less interest in the intellectual abstractions that made them famous in the first place. It’s good for a gossipy read, but a long way from definitive.

Originally from 1992, McCabe’s classic has been reissued on the back of the recent BBC2 adaptation. It spans a single day in Fermanagh in 1883, which happens to be the 25th birthday of protagonist Beth Winters. The daughter of a

Protestant father and a Catholic mother, Beth has suffered abuse at her father’s hands, as did her late mother, and been driven into the arms of Liam Ward, a Catholic who hates her father Billy. Pregnant, the determined and steely Beth is all ready to steal Billy Winters’ gold and run away to America with Liam. Flawed, and not without its moments of clumsiness, it’s still a potent portrayal of conflict, couched in a dark love story that flirts with Gothic melodrama and ensures that its characters, despite their best efforts, are condemned to repeat the past.

Harvard University Press, £30

HERMANN Hesse died in 1962. The following year, Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner published an essay which stated without preamble or evidence – Hesse himself would have been furious – that the novels were essentially accounts of a drug trip. Hesse’s adoption as a key figure in the 1960s counterculture had begun.

By the end of the decade Easy Rider was being soundtracked by a band called Steppenwolf. Young swains were inscribing copies of Demian to their older mistresses, as a way of giving their own self-absorption a degree of philosophical respectability.

There are many reasons for reading – or writing – a literary biography.

In some careers there is a fascinatingly close correlation between life and art. In others there is none, and the biographical interest lies in the perceived gap between the man or woman and the artist. For the first 500 or so pages, Decker’s Hesse seems as snivellingly complacent, cold, disengaged and hysterical as he often does on the page.

Few bodies of modern literature can make me so pointlessly angry as the span of fiction Hesse wrote between Peter Kamenzind, which in 1904 either confounded or confirmed the Pietist suspicions of the Hesse family and became a bestseller, and Narziss und Goldmund in 1930, after which the more general charge against the Swiss-dwelling Hesse was that he was soft on fascism. The latter accusation