F ERDINAND M OUNT After tracking down the Holy Grail in a
bank vault in Aberystwyth, it is hard to know what to do for an encore. But Byron Rogers has found the perfect elusive quarry in the poet R. S. Thomas, the Welsh poet who wasn’t really Welsh at all. The Man Who Went Into the West (Aurum, £16.99) is unlike any other biography, which is as it should be. I was left thinking the absolute opposite of what I started the book thinking. R. S. Thomas now seems to me a clunking poet but a magnificent priest, as well as the most wilful man who ever lived.
Hisham Matar came within a whisker of winning this year’s Booker. He would have been a good choice. In the Country of Men (Viking/Penguin, £12.99), a story of life in Libya told from the perspective of a nineyear-old, is intense, frightening and so perfectly controlled you would never guess it was a first novel.
Stephen Dorril’s Blackshirt (Viking/ Penguin, £30, £9.99) slams the lid on Oswald Mosley at last. After reading it, you can be left in no doubt about anything — the cash Mosley got from Mussolini and Hitler, his recurrent anti-Semitism, no less repellent for being so calculated, his incurable lechery and mendacity. Also his catastrophic failure over 30 years to appeal to the voters’ baser instincts. Fascism in Britain dribbled away in a trail of lost deposits.
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