Alastair Forbes
Mirabile dictu, I have particularly enjoyed several books by friends of mine, two of them on the inexhaustible subject of Tol- stoy. A. N. Wilson's splendid study (Ham- ish Hamilton, £16.95), of his elder and better fellow-novelist, for which he went to the trouble of learning Russian before visiting Yasnaya Polyana, altogether capti- vated me, just as the rather more intuitive and tentative diagnosis of the most beguil- ing and intelligent of the ambassadresses ever to grace the Court of St James, Martine de Conroe!, had intrigued me eight years ago when her very readable and original book first appeared in French. It has now been unobtrusively translated by Peter Levi (who calls it a 'penetrating study not without eccentrics') as Tolstoy: The
Ultimate Reconciliation (Scribners, $27.50). Peter's own The Life and Times of William Shakespeare (Macmillan, £16.95), I found most agreeably instructive, my own copy of it rendered vastly more precious by the author's Edward Lear-ish drawing of the Bard that accompanied his title-page dedicace. Re-reading some of the stylish prose in Roy Jenkins's Gallery of 20th- century Portraits (David & Charles, £12.95), while I couldn't help regretting that such a rare and discerning judgment had been squeezed by lesser fry from the highest office, I rejoiced that it is hence- forth available to Literature and Academe.
William Rees-Mogg was lamenting the other day a little prematurely the passing of the American WASP. In Who Knows Tomorrow? (Aurum Press, £12.95), by Barbara de Keller, a North Carolinan descendant of a Connecticut carpetbagger quite as much the genuine article as George Bush, I found a fascinating and multi-faceted cosmopolitan memoir of a well-travelled life in which the blessings and curses of Fate have been absorbed with a tender dignity that displays the author as a fine advertisement for herself.
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