Alan Judd
Jeremy Lewis, biographer, critic and former publisher, has perpetrated a third enjoyable volume of memoirs, Grub Street Irregular (HarperCollins, £20). He writes so well, with such clarity and seeming simplicity, such unexpected but apt comparisons, that he could make a software manual entertaining. In fact, he only pretends to be an autobiographer, using himself as the foil while he writes with kindly observant irony of others — which is why his memoirs are so entertaining and which tells us, also, something important about him.
Richard Holmes, pre-eminent biographer of the Romantics, tells in The Age of Wonder (HarperCollins, £25) how the Romantic generation discovered science. Contrary to popular assumption, they embraced it with wonder and enthusiasm. Holmes’s account is beautifully written, carrying you along like the great Pacific rollers that swept the young Joseph Banks to unknown Tahiti. But Holmes does more than tell good stories very well: he makes important points about scientific culture, about the necessity of ‘the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe’ — qualities as evident in his own writing as in what he writes about. This is an important book.
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