even mocks, its own ambition. If the reader does not come to the book with certain of the expectations of prose fiction - that ideas will be dramatized with such narrative momentum that one forgets they are 'ideas,' and that complete worlds will be evoked by way of prose, not merely discussed - this is a playful, witty and entertaining gathering of conjectures by a man to whom ideas are quite clearly crucial: a quintessential humanist, it would seem, of the pre-post-modernist species". For D. J. Taylor, writing in The Spectator, "[…] A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters is not a novel, according to the staider definitions; it possesses no character who rises above the level of a cipher and no plot worth speaking of. It is sharp, funny and brilliant without suggesting that this sharpness, humour and brilliance is sufficient to carry through its purpose to any satisfactory conclusion. Yet it is a significant novel, if only because it provides an inventory of the hoops through which the contemporary novelist has to jump if he wants to be taken seriously". He went on to claim that "there exists a whole pack of modern writers who delight in giving the game away, in telling you that they are making it up, in indulging in outrageous manipulations of character and plot. The result is that hardly anyone in these novels — brilliant novels, swimming with lively conceits — has that most necessary fictional quality, a life of their own" and that "A History is another of these newfangled romps, a series of neat, artfully stage-managed stories which combine to create a bizarre, off-centre view of world history". In the end, he decided, "This is an entertaining book, containing any number of sparkling jokes, but to suggest, as one or two people have begun to suggest, that it pushes back some sort of fictional frontier would be a mistake. […] Like a great deal of theoretical literary criticism — to which it bears a strong resemblance — A History expends vast ingenuity on proving something that might be regarded as an axiom. Tous les significations sont arbitraires, ["all significations are arbitrary"] as a French theorist once put it. Well, we knew that". References External links Julian Barnes' Website, with extensive bibliography of translations and scholarly articles. Brian Finney Article The Search is All?: The Pursuit of Meaning in Julian