Anne Applebaum
The best books I've read this year share a theme but not a subject. One was the Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age by Simon Schama (Fontana, £14.99). Some- one gave it to me when it first appeared in paperback three years ago, and thinking myself uninterested in Dutch history, I let it sit on the shelf. But it is in fact a book not only about Holland but about how the idea of a nation is formed, what customs and national habits, civic institutions, shared feelings about money, food and reli- gion led Holland to 17th-century super- Powerdom; with definitions of nations and nationalism in question now, the subject could hardly be more relevant. The same is true of Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (Yale, £19.95, Pimlico, £10), which investigates the origins of l3mishness, using songs and paintings as well as documents. Curiously, hatred of the French turns out to have played a large role in the formation of Britain as we know it.
Easily the most overrated books were the annual crop of feminist and anti-feminist rants which took up lots of space on review and features pages, and contributed very little to the fund of human knowledge; Naomi Wolf's Fire with Fire (Chatto, £11.99) was the most notable, but there was also Erica Jong's Fear of Fifty (Chatto, £16) to remind us that older women can rant too.
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