Colin Thubron
No book this year has absorbed me more pleasurably than Jan Morris's part-history, part-descriptive Hong Kong (Viking, £14.95), an elegant, knowledgeable and affectionate farewell to the last British colony in the East.
I wish — perhaps forlornly — that the poetess Irina Ratushinskaya's account of her four years in a Soviet labour camp might be the last of its kind too. Grey is the Colour of Hope (Hodder, £12.95) pays tribute to a group of women prisoners of conscience who outfaced grinding coer- cion. The book becomes almost a study in the psychology of human dignity.
Finally, Peter Conrad's Down Home: Revisiting Tasmania (Chatto, £12.95) is filled with quicksilver intelligence and lucidity — less the portrait of a country than a subtle evocation of the relationship between the island, the author and his childhood.
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