The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987, HB, 659pp, 978-0374115357 (or Vintage Classics, 2010 reprint, PB, 978-0099541271, £9.99)
The title of Tom Wolfe’s Dickensian masterpiece is taken from an event that occurred in Florence in 1497, when supporters of the radical Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola publicly burnt piles of books, cosmetics, and works of art — objects of luxury that might act as temptations to sin. The practice of burning books regarded as subversive found its chilling modern expression in the burning of works by Proust, Mann, Marx, and Einstein by Nazi stormtroopers in Berlin in the 1930s.
The Bonfire was published in 1987, one week before the Wall Street Crash. Previously serialised (in the style of Charles Dickens’s writings) in 27 parts in Rolling Stone, it is a big, high-octane satire on the wealth and apparent …