John Simpson
The best account of our calamitous century to have appeared this, or any, year is Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes (Michael Joseph, £20) an unimaginative title for a marvellously imaginative set of essays on the period from 1914 to the collapse of communism. For Hobsbawm, this consti- tutes virtually the history of his own life- time and ideas; and he draws the threads together with subtlety, compassion and a gentle, quizzical wit.
David Gilmour deserves our consider- able thanks for demonstrating, in his biog- raphy Curzon (John Murray, £25) how much more there was to this person than pride, hauteur and ultimately disappointed ambition.
For pure enjoyment, though, there was little to match On Secret Service East of Constantinople (John Murray, £19.99), the latest in the oeuvre of the redoubtable Peter Hopkirk, whose scholarship in searching out the events and leading figures of the Great Game and its after- math is worthy of Buchan himself: Buchan the historian as well as the novelist.
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