‘Harry Houdini, the greatest escape artist of all time, walks stark naked up six flights of stairs to Murderers’ Row, to be incarcerated as a supreme test of his power . . . In a cell opposite, Harry Thaw, eccentric heir to a railway fortune who shot architect Stanford White, finishes a six-course dinner with champagne . . . Sigmund Freud is on the loose at Coney Island, riding the scenic railway and taking a boat through the Tunnel of Love with Carl Jung . . . These are the scenes from Ragtime whose author E. L. Doctorow can be named in the same sentence as such giants of the past as James Joyce and John Dos Passos’ Evening Standard

‘Like ragtime, the jazz form made famous by Scott Joplin, Doctorow’s book is a native American fugue, rhythmic, melodic and stately. The book never stands still for a moment. Story lines constantly interweave; historical figures become part of fictional events and fictional characters participate in real history. Doctorow’s image and improvisations foreshadow the twentieth century’s coming preoccupation with scandal, psychoanalysis, solipsism, race, technological power and megalomania . . . He has seized the strands of actuality and transformed them into a fabulous tale’ Time