This was an opportunity for the retiring diplomat to get some of his grudges off his chest and to tell the unvarnished truth about the people he had been living and working with for the past few years. Matthew Parris and Andrew Bryson have ferreted out some of these dispatches which are sometimes very amusing and almost invariably non p.c.

I have found it entertaining just to dip into this book, reading the dispatches of a series of ambassadors to a given country and coming up with spicy comments like that of a retiring ambassador from Tunisia who complained that ‘Even the most educated [Tunisians] are apt to be bewildered over the diffence between right and left … which means hazards on the roads.’

The comments of retiring ambassadors to Switzerland seem amusingly relevant. Way back in 1970 one diplomat commented on the Swiss getting to their offices at 7 a.m. and the rush hour not being until 6.30 in the evening, that people will wish you a pleasant Sunday and not a pleasant weekend and that while it took a week for London packers to pack his effects when he left London, it had taken the Swiss packers just three days to perform the same task. Familiar eh?

This very funny text has much more of the same.

Frances Reilly was abandoned at the age of two by her mother, together with her sister Loretta and the baby Sinnead outside Nazareth House Convent, an orphanage in Belfast run by nuns, the Poor Sisters of Nazareth. Her account of the misery she suffered, beatings, hard labour, appalling food, abuse and emotional destruction, is harrowing.

In particular, she was the victim of a sadistic nun, Sister Thomas, and the treatment she received at this woman’s hands shocks the reader.

Even the farming family who claimed that they were providing a haven for the child, molested her sexually.

Frances resisted and, when she took to absconding from the convent, was ultimately placed in a remand home which was, if anything, worse than the original convent.

There was no escape for these tortured children as the police had faith in the convent and returned the escapees to yet another beating after each sortie.

Frances Reilly’s spirit never died and years later, she faced the perpetrators of the injustice in court. This is a dramatic account of the dreadful situation of thousands of children.

In Fear of the Collar, he tells us how, as an orphan, a few days short of his eighth birthday, he was admitted to the Industrial School. He left a country paradise and an adoptive family that he loved, to be incarcerated in one of the immense industrial schools that were set up by the Christian Brothers in Ireland.

It isn’t just the inhumanity of a dormitory with 180 beds, head to toe, lined up, (and that was just one of five, the older boys had 200 in a dormitory), the hard labour and the ferocious discipline that shock, it is the physical and sexual abuse that the small boys suffered at the hands of their ‘carers’.

The boys stayed in the school until their sixteenth birthday and were then launched into the world, ill prepared, with minimal qualifications or education. Touher tells us of his own struggles, despite his skill as a baker, acquired in the school. The horrors recounted in this text have been the subject of a subsequent enquiry. The reader wonders how such inhumanity could have been the norm for orphaned children.

You don’t need a booklet to alert you to the high feelings of the local population about the re-introduction of the almost extinct population of brown bears into the region. Be warned, if you visit the area, you are wise to express no opinion. If you are in favour of the twenty or so bears that now roam the higher meadows and forests, you will be shouted down by the sheep or goat farmers. (There are nearly 700,000 sheep present in the Pyrenees in summer). The farmers have to prove that it was a bear that devoured their lamb or kid before receiving compensation.

Express hostility to the project (four more females and a male bear captured in Slovenia were released as recently as 2006) and you will be howled down by the ecologists who will tell you that the brown bear is part of the cultural heritage of the Pyrenees and that the project has brought employment to the area and the reinforcement of protective measures for the flocks, like the spread of the Pyrenean mountain dogs as shepherd dogs.

Whichever way you feel, it cannot be denied that the issue has caught the imagination of the people of the region and is certainly a tourist attraction.

If you intend to visit Germany, this book will provide an interesting account of at least one thing to eat, look at or visit in the area to which you are going.

The author has distilled his many years of visiting into what might be looked on as a sort of  ’travelling companion’, revealing Germany to be a place of extraordinary diversity and eccentricity. His book is sure to surprise you and make you laugh, as well. And if you have never thought of visiting Germany, perhaps thinking of it as a rather dull and over-organised place, this book might well change your mind.

You will be introduced to some of the finer points of German cuisine (‘there’s always a pig or a potato around the next corner, but there is a lot to be done with these two life forms’), as well as some of the country’s culture and history, which is anything but dull!

Carol Topolski is a practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Perhaps that is why each of the narratives in the story rings so true. We hear the voices of the parents, the policeman who found the decaying corpse, the grandparents, a busybody neighbour and a host of others.

Each of them participated in some way in the horror and, for all of them, nothing will ever be the same again.

The picture is slowly fitted together and the horrible truth is that we understand even the evil couple who gave birth to Samantha. This book is gripping but not to be mistaken for an easy read. Don’t give it to your grandmother!

The lady in pink suggests that Oscar  should write a letter to God each night. Each letter will represent a decade, so that we find Oscar at the age of 110, exclaiming with delight that he is older than his parents now. The letters are a lovely way of coming to terms with harsh reality.

The lady in pink has the very touching final words on the morning Oscar dies.

Oscar and the Lady in Pink, translated from Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s original novel in French, is a world best-seller – understandably! It fits into the category of ‘self-help’ without being patronising or mawkish.

There are copies in the outstanding selection of books in English at the La Combe Migros store in Nyon. What a surprise to find such well-chosen novels, best-selling crime-fiction and factual books at prices that are approachable.

John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

The excerpt from the Guardian review on the front of this book claims that this is a ‘small wonder of a book … A particular historical moment that cannot be told too often’.  Clearly thousands agree since The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has reached the bestseller list and has now been made into a movie.

My parents-in-law were deeply involved in military research and the Manhattan Project- at great personal cost – and I remember my mother-in-law stating very clearly that she had heard the story told far too often. It was time to stop writing novels about the Holocaust. The facts do not need fictional re-telling. Reading John Boyne’s novel made me agree strongly with her feeling.

Nine-year-old Bruno remains completely unaware of what he is experiencing when he lives just outside the fence at Auschwitz. His father is the Camp Commandant, a servant of the state who is completely indoctrinated and committed to his task.

Bruno meets Shmuel, a nine-year-old Polish Jew who is an inmate of the camp – the boy in the striped pyjamas. Their relationship leads to the final grotesque twist in the story.

The group of us who read this novel together were all intensely frustrated by the naivety of the narrator. It went beyond belief and removed all verisimilitude from the story. Perhaps the movie will somehow cope with this nasty story and justify the writing of yet one more Holocaust novel.

The initial scenario of the funeral of Molly Lane introduces many of the men who have loved her, and her bereaved husband, George, who is clearly rather resentful of her old flames. Three of these interact for the remainder of the story and we witness heartless and unscrupulous behaviour.

The musician, Clive Linley, horrifies us by his self-interest when he continues to compose his symphony rather than come to the assistance of a victim of the lake district rapist. His symphony will have its première in Amsterdam.

The newspaper editor, Vernon Halliday, deliberately engineers the downfall of the eminent politician. Convinced that his one-time friend, the musician, has let him down and is verging on insanity, he too travels to Amsterdam, to dispose of the musician.

The politician and the bereaved husband travel together to Amsterdam in the superbly engineered dénouement. This novel moves on at a speedy pace, neatly ties up all the ends and really is a joy to read.

I found myself checking on the Internet. Did Aero already exist in 1935? Yes – it came out in that year! The historical background is convincing even to the negative comments on women rowing in eights. My mother-in-law rowed, that year, in the first race on the river when the Oxford ladies were actually on the river at the same time as the Cambridge ladies. (Until then, they had rowed separately and competed to have the best time).

McEwan exploits the attitudes towards sex of the 1935 Tallis family, when 13-year-old Briony intercepts a compromising letter, witnesses what she interprets to be threatening acts and makes an accusation that affects her own life and the lives of her sister and her sister’s lover.

Robbie’s ‘atonement’ takes him to Wandsworth Prison and into the infantry. Sections of the book take us to the retreat from Dunkirk. We relive the squalor of the retreat and its effect on British hospitals, through the eyes and minds of Robbie and Briony, who, as part of her atonement, has become a nurse.

In an intricate metafictional twist, Briony is writing the book as atonement. We meet her finally when she is 77, still coming to terms with her error of 1935.

Now I am really looking forward to the film!