Gabriele Annan
I liked Karl Miller's Rebecca's Vest (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99) about his early life in Scotland, Cambridge, and London. The title is a tease, and so is the book. You have to watch out for gnomish jokes leap- ing out from the dark Scottish pines along this unfamiliar path. The whole exercise is unexpected, funny about being gloomy, gloomy about being funny, and quite unlike the usual rural childhood-grammar school- Oxbridge c. v.
Most of the novels I got for review were terribly long; so I didn't manage very many, and preferred a short one, Alain de Bot- ton's Essays on Love (Macmillan, £12.99). It is civilised, funny, and cool without being snide.
To my surprise, I actually enjoyed a book about an 18th-century German philoso- pher, J. G. Hamann. I'd known he existed ever since I was an undergraduate, but had been afraid to ask more. Isaiah Berlin's The Magus of the North (John Murray, £14.99) tells you everything you need to know, and makes you realise how important Hamann was as an inventor of modern irrationalism. Berlin's book is a delight to read, in spite of its intimidatng subject.
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