Christopher Howse
Two biographies changed my view this year of people who already command a wide appeal. William Oddie’s Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy (Oxford, £25) gives a deeper understanding of its subject’s thought, and the background to it, than any book since Chesterton’s Autobiography in 1936, which emphasised the importance of his childhood and his later conquest of pessimism. Dr Oddie brings out Chesterton’s left-wing presuppositions and his astonishing gift for sharp insights, taking his story up to 1908 and the publication of Orthodoxy.
Peter Martin’s Samuel Johnson (Weidenfeld, £25) collects a mass of significant detail into a thoroughly readable narrative that compels admiration for this lovable man’s generosity to underdogs and his determination in overcoming melancholy.
Those who did not know her are not perhaps accustomed to seeing approachable humanity in the work of G. E. M. Anscombe, the foremost analytical philosopher of the late 20th century. There is more of it than expected in a collection of her essays on religion and ethics, published under the title Faith in a Hard Ground by the University of St Andrews (Imprint Academic, £17.95). In addition to the usual hard-headed explosions of popular fallacies, she gives a moving account of what the presence of God can mean.
The books I threw away this year have left not a ripple on the surface.
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