Some of these have the feel of saintly visions. The brothers encounter a silent woman dressed in a white raincoat and blue scarf — the colours of the Virgin.

As adults, each of the brothers meets Asher Ruppta, an unscrupulous landlord from the West Indies running a Rachman-like housing operation. Ruppta tells tall tales of conjurors who fall into trances, of spirits and ghost birds and of a boy who         becomes a tree, his skin slowly turning to bark. In one scene a collection of household objects in the boys' childhood home flies around the room, including a copy of the Penguin Book of Greek Myths.

It is never quite clear how much of this is real and how much the product of sleeplessness, worry or the trauma of being abandoned by their mother. At times it is frustrating. We invest our energies in passages, only to discover they never really happened. On more than one occasion, there's an unsatisfactory sense of "and then I woke up".

If this is magical realism, then there is greater satisfaction to be had from those scenes which take place firmly in reality.

Ackroyd's pen portraits of the intersecting worlds of academia, literary London and Fleet Street are written with relish.

When Daniel becomes an English fellow at his Cambridge college, Ackroyd gleefully describes a scene at high table where senior fellows trade Horatian epigrams and sneer at the recent publications — "The State of Coinage with Relation to the Plays of Philip Massinger" — of young pretenders.