Penelope Lively gets better with every book. In Treasures of Time she raises all sorts of issues about the past. Does a place have an atmosphere given by its history? Or is the genius loci entirely subjective, dependent on the onlooker? Tom, the postgraduate student of 18th-century antiquarianism, is asked by a party of Japanese tourists to accompany them round Oxford and its environs—and 'explain'. Almost everything is misunderstood by the visitiors…. Tom concludes that 'what you feel about what you see depends not on what it is, but who you are. A place is an illusion.'

When the characters in Treasures of Time are forced to reexamine their own and one another's past, identity is shown to be as illusory as place. An elderly spinster has a second stroke and dies. Her sister, apparently a completely self-contained, insensitive person, with a 'knack of instantly putting...