Simon Courtauld
Alistair Home's The Lonely Leader: Monty 1944-45 (Macmillan, £17.50) is full of intriguing insights into the character of the most remarkable of our second world war generals. It owes much to the cooperation of Monty's son and to previously unpublished diaries which tell of the caravan life that he shared with his young liaison officers, from the Normandy coast to Luneburg Heath. The betting book, which went with them to the various tactical headquarters, records that in January 1945 Monty was wagering that the war under Eisenhower's direction would not be over before October.
Though published just over a year ago, Paul Preston's immensely authoritative 1,000-page biography, Franco (Harper- Collins, £25), deserves a mention whenever possible. It is also very readable. As a very occasional reader of novels, I have only just come across the work of Rose Tremain, whose Restoration (Sceptre, £5.99) is wonderfully evocative of 17th-century Eng- land and at times hilarious.
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