A model- maker at a rally on the Isle of Man made him a replica of his 1963 Riley Elf, and, he says, “it’s up on my wall at home – it’s a nice reminder of the weekend during the week.” Do his friends send him up for playing with toys? Frazer chuckles “Not to my face. But then a lot of my friends are into it too.” Like Robinson’s subjects, they obviously share the dream of the blacktop stretching to the far distance, the promise of the horizon “Lone cowboy, that’s the anthropology,” muses Hodgett “I’m not sure it’s just a male thing I think we all need a little of it.” !. So although this is no sardonic toys-for-the-boys study, the lines leading back into childhood games aren’t hidden. His subjects are only eccentric in their choice of plaything – if the wealthy can satisfy a higher class of fantasy, and have the means to put a bigger distance between duties and dreams, regular citizens have to find theirs closer to home.University lecturer John Hodgett turned from cars to motorbikes to save cash and time getting to work, “but within 10 minutes I was hooked. They are shown with their machines twice over, as if the miniature and the real thing inhabit parallel time zones, allowing them to live in the past and the pragmatic present at once. Robinson collected these images in Northern Ireland and the Midlands, because he was fascinated by the ways in which the modern need for extended mobility expands into a hobby or even a way of life – but also because, as a young photographer from Northern Ireland, he felt The Troubles propelling him inevitably toward a world of grainy black-and-white photo-realism.

Maybe Fermanagh-based photographer David Robinson’s series Die-Cast Dreams doesn’t go that far, but he at least suspects that if human beings can take on the characteristics of their dogs then perhaps they can take on the characteristics of their vehicles, too. “Though I started out repeating that reportage style,” he says, “I found I wanted to say, `Northen Ireland is also a beautiful place, and the ordinary people living here have dreams just like every else.’ So I found myself working in colour more, and trying to be more oblique, positive, and personal.”
Robinson’s subjects each acquired their model car (or plane, or cement mixer) after their involvement with its big brother, rather than the other way round. IN Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman, people turned gradually into bicycles, and only those with a keen eye and inside information could recognise the characteristic lean against the wall or step up on the kerb that revealed the morph under way. The close reading of her own life reveals truths for the rest of us What nobler purpose can memoir-writing serve?. And grants, and tenure, and wonderful wrider’s retreats where they get to hang out for free and just create.

All this free time and cooking with basil might grate, except that Rose is a charming companion. Alongside Proust she takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the significant mom- ents in her life (first marriage, giving birth, falling in love with the already-married Frenchman, mother’s terminal illness, lump in breast), but it is reminiscence with a purpose: the old-fashioned one of the transmission of wisdom and insight. Rose would die rather than compare herself to Proust; but she is inspired by him. Clearly, she’s a writer (pronounced “wrider”), but not as we know it They have respect over there.

She divides her time, as they say, between New York and Key West, Florida; when she’s not having Salman Rushdie to dinner she’s sipping cocktails and watching the sunset with her delightful French husband (number two) and buying rare prints from her favourite New York dealer. In fact, her last chapter is devoted to her rueful admission of failure as a novelist (one more from this addictively quotable book: “I should have known I was in trouble when I heard myself describe [my] novel as a cross between Memoirs of Hadrian and Ragtime”). Like a good dinner guest, Rose works hard to amuse.
As a lecturer at Weslyan University, Rose seems to live, by British academic standards, an unimaginably luxurious life. Third, Rose does not make any grandiose claims for the “literariness” of the memoir. First, it really does make you want to read Proust, which in my view is a triumph (“For a long time,” confides Rose herself, “Like a heavy car with a tiny engine, I charged up the hill again and again only to stall around page 50, somewhere within the exhausting story of young Marcel’s getting to sleep one night in Combray.”) Second, it is mercifully short. Some people are suspicious of the memoir form, feeling that its promiscuous use has produced a lot of self-indulgent writing But this memoir has some notable redeeming features. But such a book would have to be completely non-narrative, a collection of recipes, phone numbers, e-mail, answering machine messages, jottings on notepads, TV Guide listings, tax returns, newspaper clippings, and reading lists.” Thank goodness, The Year of Reading Proust is not that book.

All that unstructured, stream-of-consciousness, undifferentiated flotsam and jetsam might be fun in theory, but in practice would make dreary reading. If you can imagine an intimate seminar on Proust given by an entertaining, candid, motherly and rather rambling academic and accompanied by several large glasses of wine, you’ll get some idea of Rose’s book. The illustration above is from 1798 with the great English Whig Charles James Fox (left) and the British radical Horne Tooke (right) caricatured as the creatures of French democracy Diona Gregory. Phyllis Rose aspires in her A Memoir in Real Time “to write a book counter-conventional, paradoxical, and true to the lived experience of our times. Pakenham bases his account on contemporary sources, scrutinising events in the context of the war between Britain and France and the revolutionary fervour sweeping through Europe.