Francis King
THE most satisfactory, if not the most exciting, novel of the year was Allan Massie's A Question of Loyalties (Hutch- inson, £12.95). This substantial and com- plex study of how a French aristocrat and intellectual came to serve under Petain as a minister convinced me that Massie was the Scots writer who should have been on the Booker shortlist, The first volume of Richard Holmes's Coleridge (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.95) promises that, when completed, this will be one of the outstanding biographies of our times. But am I alone in being exasperated by this modern fashion of splitting biog- raphies into two halves?
Although no literary masterpiece, Bar- bara Skelton's Weep No More (Hamish Hamilton, £12.95) has greatly entertained me with its devastating truthfulness.
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