You can always spot a Scot of my generation as soon as he opens his mouth. And well before a single word is spoken. Just as the distinctive coastline of the Western Isles is a product of long years of turbulent interaction between the wind-whipped brine of the Atlantic and embattled outcrops of igneous rock formations, so the trademark smile I share with my fellow fortysomething countrymen is formed by the dramatic interplay between tidal waves of sugar and embattled outcrops of what were once milky-white calcium. My mouth is worse than most, looking, at its best, like a Siberian village after a meteorite has hit it, all lopsided structures and strange glittering pieces of metal strewn at random.

A smile like a disaster zone is, however, just one legacy of growing up in Seventies Aberdeen. The sweet tooth I acquired then (now terribly corroded) has stayed with me. Offer me a bar from Green & Blacks with 89 per cent pure Guatemalan cocoa solids and I'll ask for a Crunchie. Allow me to wander at will through a posh wine list and you'll find me ordering the hock.

There's nothing to be ashamed of in carrying tastes formed in childhood over into adult life. And the greatest sophistication normally lies in taking a sensation which we all, secretly, adore - such as sweetness - and raising it to a higher level. Whether it's tokay or sauternes, pavlova or crème brûlée, the combination of thermonuclear sweetness and delicacy of construction is beguiling.

There's one other taste, apart from sweetness, which a Seventies childhood in Aberdeen leaves a boy with. And that's a thirst for conflict.

For my generation, reading didn't mean Harry Potter and Tracy Beaker, it meant Warlord, Commando and Battle-Action. Initiation into literature meant absorption in the comic-book adventures of Second World War heroes. Union Jack Jackson, the Brit serving alongside the American GIs, and Lord Peter Flint, the playboy secret agent, were the companions of my youth. Which is why I can't get annoyed by, indeed rather approve of, the Government's suggestion that boys today be induced to read through comic books.

And, just as my childhood sweet tooth can now be indulged with adults-only products from Majestic and Waitrose, so, I can also wallow in a warm bath of Commando nostalgia, but updated with all the sophistication, and humour required to satisfy an adult palate, thanks to Bloomsbury. It is the publisher behind Coward on the Beach, a new novel by James Delingpole. It's a fantastic holiday read which manages to combine a gripping retelling of D-Day, in Beevoresque detail, with a series of rather louche George Macdonald Fraser-like flourishes. Like Flashman, or even Sharpe, but updated for the 20th century, it's a natural serial. But that's not the highest compliment I can play - the real charm of the book is that you can tell the author wrote this sort of novel, because this is the sort of novel he wanted to read - and so will any Commando veteran.

Let history neglect them

There are some books, however, which the author appears to have written not because he wanted someone to read it but because he wanted an editor to commission it. It's into that category, I fear, that Patrick Brontë: Father of Genius must fall. How many, of even the most ardent lovers of Victorian fiction, will want to read tens of thousands of words on Charlotte and Emily's dad when there are already hundreds of thousands of words by Charlotte, Emily, Elizabeth, the other Charlotte (M. Yonge) and George Eliot to delight in, and that's before you even get to the men.

There has been a spate of this stuff recently - biographies of Charles Darwin's wife, studies of Virginia Woolf's servants, lives of Henry the Eighth's second wife's sister-in-law (Lady Rochford, as it happens). Publishers are clearly in the market for niche lives of those whom history has hitherto neglected. But I, for one, don't want the story of the other Boleyn girl, the father of genius or the auntie of greatness. I want the Big Life, Well Told. Which is why I'm looking forward so much to Richard Holmes's Marlborough...

What Mr Bennet did next

Mind you, if we are to have literary relatives taking centre stage, why can't we have lives of those fictional figures who really are intriguing, and could bear much closer scrutiny? Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice could carry at least one novel in his own right as a sort of Regency Victor Meldrew, and the back story of Captain Grimes, the white slaver turned prep school master in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, would be truly gripping.

When fiction has left so many worthwhile stories untold why do we need to grub around in the arid realm of fact?

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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