David Pryce-Jones
Roger Kimball has a Voltairean wit and clarity as an expositor of ideas. He thinks that today's culture is putrid, and in The Long March (Encounter Books, $23.95) he shows how this has come about. A series of bright fools and frauds have managed to persuade the public that the arts are to be detached from moral judgments, and there is no truth anywhere. Kimball gives the Mailers and Susan Sontags and other trumpet-blowers of the day their come- uppance. What a pleasure it is to find this forbidden fruit in the orchard of political correctness.
Muriel Spark's Aiding and Abetting (Viking, £11.99) has a narrative verve and economy all its own — altogether exem- plary. She speculates about Lord Lucan, his motives and his fate. I just knew that morose and murderous earl, and can vouch for the likelihood of her invention.
Letters between a Father and Son (edited by Gillon Aitken, Little Brown, £18.99) consists of correspondence between V. S. Naipaul making his way as a scholarship boy in Oxford, and his father and a sister back in Trinidad. 'The world is a pretty awful place,' the young Naipaul writes, and it touches the heart to see how lovingly and confidently he and his family encouraged each other through much adversity.
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