Raymond Carr
My favourite book this year stands out from the load of ill-informed rot written about Flamenco music. It is the new, enlarged edition of Gerald Howson's The Flamencos of Cadiz Bay (Bold Strumming Ltd). Howson is a guitarist who made friends with the great musicians in the poor quarters of Cadiz; the result is a unique, if sometimes clumsily written, portrait of a vanished society. I found Richard Holmes's Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (Flamingo, £6.99) a beautifully written and deeply moving account of a strange friendship. In 1944 Auberon Herbert used to prophesy the inevitable break up of the Soviet Empire. Such attacks on our great ally caused some embarrassment and a fight in the old Cavendish in which Herbert knocked out an American intellectual soldier. Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium (Granta, £14.99) shows very vividly how the break up Auberon prophesied for years, only to be dismissed as a Catholic, pro-Polish crank, has actually occurred.
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