Francis King
The novel to stay most vividly in my mind is one which was first published in France in 1873 but which had to wait until this year to appear in England: The Abbe Tigrane by Ferdinand Fabre (translated by Robert Liddell, Peter Owen, £10.95). Set in the Great Seminary of a town which one suspects to be Montpellier, this powerful story of ecclesiastical ambition briefly propelled its author, sometimes called 'the Hardy of the Cevennes', from the second into the first rank.
I also greatly enjoyed Stephen Spender's The Temple (Faber, £10.95), because of what it so vividly and so touchingly told me about the youthful years not merely of its author, but also of Auden, Isherwood and, above all, Herbert List — whom I knew, in the Fifties in Greece, as a photographer of genius and a friend of wary charm.
The best biography I read was A. N. Wilson's Tolstoy (Hamish Hamilton, £16.95). A portrait of a man whose egotism demanded that everyone around him be-
come a character in the tumultuous drama of his life, it stands up well to comparison with its monumental predecessor by Henri Troyat.
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