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The title is sly and ironic, and so is the book. 'Is unbelievable. I arriving London, Heathlow Airport...' Twenty-three- year-old Zhuang - or Z, as she calls herself, to make it easier for the locals - is coming to England to learn the language. The better her English gets, the better she can articulate her thoughts and feelings - by which disarmingly simple device, what begins as a light comedy blossoms into something a bit more substantial.

Domestic tensions wrangle with historical inevitability in [Julian Rathbone]'s latest book on Britain's colonial past.

Although his family was from Liverpool, [Julian Rathbone] was born in an aunt's nursing home in south London, and was rocked in a cradle under a blanket decorated with snowdrops. He returned to Liverpool, but was packed off to a boarding school in Dorset, before reading English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where among his fellow students were Bamber Gascoigne, the writer and high-necked quizmaster, and the late Sylvia Plath, writer, wife of the poet Ted Hughes and feminist martyr.

The family is represented today by Julian Rathbone, who leads one of the two Charity Investment teams within Rathbones. Julian is based in the Liverpool office and has been with the company since 1997 having qualified as a Chartered Accountant with Price Waterhouse Coopers in London.

[Catherine Dixon] and Sophie find themselves dodging bullets, bombs and butcher's knives, running for their lives with children in tow across the bloodbath developing in the north-central plain. You do tend to feel sorry for them and the 'innocents' they represent, but the copious (though engaging) historical interludes and graphic descriptions of carnage on both sides dissipate any empathy that may be developing. It doesn't help that most characters, central and peripheral, fictional and historical, pop it with little or no ceremony and that the author himself seems to regard many of them as somewhat idiotic. Three lusty Indian women stand out as having an 'admirable' personality--Lavania, nursemaid to Sophie's children; beautiful Uma Blackstock, a half-Indian, half-English spy to the Rani of Jhansi; and the Rani herself. [Julian Rathbone] has tried to present both sides of the story fairly, and the racial, religious and cultural bigotry of the Brits that sparked the whole slaughter in the first place is unflinchingly represented. Why he uses the potentially offensive 'mutiny' for the title rather than something more neutral becomes clearer in his personal 'notes and reflections'. Here he talks of both sides being 'guilty of appalling atrocities' and states his view: what happened in 1857 was a 'mutiny', a 'revolt', perhaps even an 'uprising' in certain areas of the sub-continent, but was certainly no 'War of Independence' given how much of the Native Army remained either uninvolved or loyal to the British.

'Art is not serious,\" wrote the novelist Julian Rathbone in an essay \"cobbled together\" for a collection of his work, The Indispensable Julian Rathbone, in 2003. \"[Art] is frivolous. It is subversive. It is ludic, it is play, it is Kubrick's train set. It is the best thing we have on this squidgy little planet.\" A single paragraph later, Rathbone took a sharp turn. \"I can get very angry,\" he wrote. \"Here are the things that make me angry.\" He then compiled a short annotated list. At the top of the list was \"people who take themselves seriously\". Rathbone, who has died aged 73 after a long illness, was born in Blackheath, south London, even though the family then lived in Liverpool. \"I was born in Blackheath because [the nursing home] was part-owned and run by my Aunt Helen and so it was free,\" he recalled. Historically, the Rathbones were shipbuilders, philanthropists, Unitarians, independent-minded politicians, writers and thesps - \"Basil Rathbone was a great actor, ruined by Sherlock Holmes\" (Julian was Basil's great nephew). Currently, there are also Rathbone musicians, painters, potters, artisans, photographers and quilters. \"Not many of us work happily for someone else,\" said Julian. Rathbones are made typical by \"being as untypical as can be\". Rathbone's most recent historical novel is The Mutiny (2007), which examines the Indian uprising of 1857. Wit, anger, feeling, erudition: all of the Rathbonian qualities were on display in the last words he wrote in The Indispensable Julian Rathbone. They stand neither as an epitaph, nor as a manifesto but they don't half sound like him thinking about stuff like that. Here's a handful of sentences: \"Genes may be selfish but what keeps them alive is not a drive to avoid extinction, but their carriers' passion to stay alive, because being alive is such good fun. There's no need to be hung up about death and dying. What's the least important part of a sentence? The full stop, of course.\"

[Sophie Hardcastle] does get pregnant and, not without alarms, settles into the role of dutiful wife and mother. There is that handsome cad, Bruce Farquhar, to be kept at bay. ('Lieutenant Farquhar, either you are drunk already or you are trying to flirt with me.') At one point, it looks as if she is going to yield to his advances out of sheer boredom. But this is not a Flashman novel; and [JULIAN RATHBONE], though he has the same infectious love of history as George MacDonald Fraser, is not in the entertainment business, not this time. He has a weightier theme, and as the clouds darken over poor Sophie, he tackles that theme with gusto.

[Julian Rathbone] knows this, which is perhaps one reason why he doesn't read historical novels and is chary of the TV version of the past. It doesn't stop him writing historical novels though. He has written four. Joseph, set during the Peninsular War, got him on to the Booker short- list in 1979. Then he spent a decade and a half writing crime, and \"straight\" fiction before being mugged by the publicity campaign for Braveheart, at which point the groat dropped. The Last English King came out in 1997 to keen reviews and has sold steadily ever since, largely, according to Rathbone's publisher, Richard Beswick, on word of mouth. Sales recently galloped past the 120,000 mark, which is not what you'd expect of a novel telling the story of \"a jumped-up little Norman and his bunch of psychopaths\" from the point of view of one of King [Harold]'s class- of-1066 housecarls; a story given murky colour by Anglo-Saxons using Anglo-Saxon expressions and Normans behaving badly. \"Cry God for William, England and Saint... Who's the patron saint of England, Odo? You're a fucking bishop, aren't you? You ought to know,\" bawls The Conqueror at the foot of Senlac Hill. Kings of Albion, the follow-up, shot forward half a millennium to appraise the Wars of the Roses from the perspective of a posse of Indians, who, in their travels of Ingerlond, encounter inexplicable sexual practices, epic savagery, \"footie\" and the weather. By this time, it was clear that Rathbone had somehow poured the molten plastic of historical fiction into a brand new and not entirely fire- proof mould - not quite satire but not quite adolescent Boys' Own adventure either.

There is a burial ground near to where I live that would serve the purpose perfectly - I feel it would be infinitely better than a church. I have only ever paid it one visit, because it makes me shudder to see the place where I might be buried. It was slightly more formal and institutional than I would have expected, but pleasant enough. You are able to choose any kind of ceremony you would like, even a religious one, and you can be buried in whatever you prefer, be it a coffin or a biodegradable sack. The main idea is that your body is recycled into a pleasant landscape. While I don't believe in returning to the earth in any mystical fashion, I do think it makes sense of death. As for music, I would like the one or two pieces that meant a lot to me during my lifetime to be played, in particular, Bruce Springsteen's No Surrender. My wife wants it played at her funeral, too, but I think I shall pre-empt her. Then, and in complete contrast, I want the last movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, because it alternates between rather grandiose, posturing music and a swinging little tune. It should diffuse the pomp and circumstance of the occasion quite nicely. I constantly read and reread [James Joyce]'s Ulysses, and the part where Stephen and Bloom meet never fails to move me. Two soldiers have knocked Stephen down, and Bloom picks him up and dusts him off. I find that very touching, giving one infinite hope for recovery. It might be appropriate at a funeral, because I'd like the reading to be upbeat. Were I to believe in an afterlife, I'd like to meet James Joyce there - even though, not knowing what to say to him, I would probably just fall speechless to my knees in front of him.

IT HAD to happen, in Blair's Britain, sooner or later: spin- doctoring has spread from politics to publishing. Newspaper folk are accustomed to receiving complaints from those who feel their beloved MP or party has been misrepresented but this week the literary editor of this newspaper received an astonishing call from Viking, the publishers of Jane Brown's Spirits of Place: Five Famous Lives in their English Landscape. The PR lady in question took exception to Anne Chisholm's unfavourable review of the book on these pages last Sunday. She not only ignored Ms Chisholm's status as a distinguished author and critic but implied that, as she was writing a life of Frances Partridge, our reviewer had a hidden agenda. Could we not send the book out for review again? Such a suggestion reveals how some publicists have lost all touch with reality. When told about this, Anne Chisholm revealed that she did indeed have an agenda . . . not to be as unkind about the book as she could have been.