Julian Barnes is one of the most celebrated and most variously rewarding of Britain's younger writers--that is, those who were born in the late 1940s and began publishing in the late 1970s or the 1980s, a group that also includes Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. The author of seven novels under his own name--Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989) are probably the ones best known in the United States--he has also published four exceptional detective novels under the pseudonym "Dan Kavanagh" and a book of short stories. Furthermore, he is a busy and knowledgeable journalist. From 1990 to 1995 he was the London correspondent for The New Yorker, contributing the "Letter from London" column every few months on topics such as the royal family and the quirkier side of British politics. These pieces, which were published in book form in 1995, demonstrate his skill as an...