PAPERBACKS

! A World Elsewhere by Bernard Levin, Sceptre pounds 6.99. Levin tells us in his preface that this survey of Utopianism was written to satisfy a lifelong obsession. The idea is close to the heart of almost all human culture, which leaves Levin happily free to survey the whole history of world thought from the Golden Age of Hesiod, through Plato, the Buddha, Atlantis, Thomas More, Robert Owen and Marx, to Narnia and Middle Earth. He gets singularly inclusive at times, especially talking about Buddhism and Christianity. Utopia is essentially an attempt to find a system of perfect social relations, which Nirvana is not and nor is Christ's idea of Paradise. Even the court of Arthur, several times referred to, is not a Utopia. Early on Levin covers his back by arguing that, in all utopian endeavours and fantasies, the serpent sooner or later wriggles in to spoil the fun.

! Women & Ghosts by Alison Lurie, Minerva pounds 6.99. Ghost stories can inhabit a space anywhere between the seriously Gothic and the send-up. Lurie's stories tend to exploit the ludicrous side of the supernatural, not for any lack of fell purpose in her ghosts - they are generally avengers, wreckers and sometimes murderers - but because they invariably mock earthbound pretensions and vanities. In these tales, Lurie carefully inks in the social context of the hauntings: a US Embassy in West Africa, a timid girl moving in with her male-chauvinist fiance, Halloween in Edge City, the American cult of dieting. Lurie's subtle and pleasing satire proves supernatural comedy doesn't have to be broad farce.

! Romans: Their Lives and Times by Michael Sheridan, Phoenix pounds 7.99. "There are no real Romans left" is the complaint Sheridan quotes in the first of these vigorous and fascinating essays, which looks at the eternally changing stock-pot which is Rome's population. Most of the city's modern full-time residents are either migrants or the descendants of migrants who came two, three or four generations ago. Ever since the collapse of the Papal States and the arrival of the railway they've come from the Italian countryside; more recently they have flooded in from Italy's former African colonies. Michael Sheridan, who was the Independent's Rome correspondent for ten years, also provides vivid and intriguing sketches on, among other topics, the Latin heritage, the Papacy and the Red Brigades.

! A Second Life by Dermot Bolger, Penguin pounds 6.99. This novel begins with a brilliant, sensuous account of the near-death experience: "my body glowing like in a sexual climax, only more gentle, until the heat became an intense tingling wave..." Bolger's hero, Sean Blake, is a photographer who, having barely survived a car crash and been presented with a second bite at life, goes on a quest for the mother who gave him up for adoption. Perhaps a shade artificially, Bolger uses multiple timescales - from the '50s to present-day Ireland - in his search for parallels and portents to justify Blake's impassioned sense of wrong. And his mid-book anger, mostly against nuns and priests, seems excessive after the epiphany of the opening pages.

! Lilley & Chase by Tim Waterstone, Headline pounds 5.99. Rather as if Joe Coral had taken a ride in the Lincoln Handicap, a distinguished bookseller has written a chunky novel with designs on the bestseller lists. The book's aesthetic owes more to Galsworthy than Will Self but the detail - rise and fall of the eponymous publishing house closely linked to the emotional lives of its founders - is contemporary. But much of this rather flat novel reads like the author's synopsis for an even longer story.

! Hopkins: A Literary Biography by Norman White, Oxford pounds 13.99 This prizewinning biography boosts our understanding of Hopkins both as a Victorian and a "modern" poet. A phrase turned by his Benjamin Jowett about the "smooth sleek religionism" of his times captures the mind-set of a certain type of mid-Victorian University man. The poet's rooms displayed statuettes on brackets with green and purple silk backcloths. He read Pusey, gushed over the "pious and original" architecture of Street and Butterfield and at last went the whole hog, turning Papist, then priest. Reality proved harder for this vulnerable homosexual man, and his ride as a Jesuit was rough. But out of misery came poetry in which technical experiment and emotion were solidly fused.