30 NOVEMBER 1991, Page 40

J. L. Carr

Penelope Fitzgerald's The Gate of Angels (Fontana, £4.99) is a marvellous story told lightly. (Much artifice always needed to pull that off.) Then Ellis Peters' Summer of the Danes (Headline, £13.95) set by the Menai Straits in 1144. I was much encour- aged to discover that I enjoyed Helen Simpson's recent Four Bare Legs in a Bed (Minerva, £4.99) as much as a second read- ing of Captain Marryat's The Children of the New Forest — last read in 1920, as a Sunday-school prize. I only reached chapter three of R.L. Stevenson's Black Arrow. It is truly amazing how so laboriously silly a book still stays in print. I believe he didn't write it.