Here’s an update of things I’ve been reading lately that I’d recommend. One is about creators, a couple others the creations of last year’s Nobel laureate in literature, Patrick Modiano. I begin with him

The son of a Jewish, Italian father and a Flemish mother, some of Modiano’s extra-literary reputation is based on works that explore the complicity of the occupied French in the Nazi extermination of their fellow citizens. But his work is clearly deserving of recognition on the basis of its literary merits.

Jane, my guru in all things French, assures me that his prose is spare, beautiful and seductive in the original. In translation, it is certainly hard to resist for the dreamlike lucidity with which it narrates mysteries. I have so far read “Missing Person” and “Out of the Dark.”

These works adopt the mood and some of the apparatus of film noir mysteries, but the secret the characters are pursuing is often their own identify, their own past selves. In short, Modiano uses pulp fiction conventions to stalk bigger game, and the results are haunting.

I suppose he would be classed as a post-modernist alongside people such as Sebald and Eco. I was left unsure if either of the works I read arrived at anything that would ordinarily be regarded as a conclusion, but I was not sorry I’d spent time in Modiano’s France– real, but oddly heightened and sinister, like a street scene in a Giorgio de Chirico painting.

“The Creators” is by the venerable British historian, Paul Johnson. and is something else entirely. Johnson was a lefty in his youth, a Thatcher conservative in his maturity, which made him less that welcome in some academic circles. His best work is probably “The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815-1830.” “Creators” is less a work of scholarship than of appreciation comprised of a series of chapters on admired figures from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Austen and Twain and on to the 20th century.

Johnson is always readable and amusingly opinionated. Agree or disagree, he’s fun to listen to. His bias in this book is always in favor of hard-working master craftsmen as opposed to self-congratulatory aesthetes. Thus, his enthusiasm for men like Bach, Durer and Turner.

He’s also a traditionalist, so naturally his pantheon includes A.W.N. Pugin — the architect of the 19th century Gothic Revival. In a similar vein, he praises the unabashedly elitist Cristobal Balenciaga whose inspiration often came from clothing pictured in court paintings by Velazquez or the saints of Zubaran. In one vigorously polemical chapter he dismisses Picasso as a dead end of genius as opposed to Walt Disney, and makes a provocative case for this seemingly absurd reordering of 20th Century art history.

A beautiful and tragic chapter on Louis Comfort Tiffany alone is worth the price of admission. The designer’s exquisite work made him rich and famous, but by the early 20th Century, thanks to the faddish, inconstancy of modern times, he was regarded s passé. Johnson tells us that by 1950 the vast majority of his work had been destroyed as worthless, even including decorations to The White House that Theodore Roosevelt had smashed in an act of vandalism worthy of the Taliban.