Recent paperbacks
James HughesOnslow
The Victorian Christmas Book Anthony and Peter Miall (Dent pp. 192, £3.50). When mincemeat was meat, turkeys were smaller and fewer than geese and Christmas was noncommercial. A nostalgic guide to recipes and customs, most of them pagan in origin.
A Few Green Leaves Barbara Pym (Granada pp. 220, £1.50). The most under-rated novelist of the century, say Philip Larkin and David Cecil. This posthumous work describes quiet revolution in English village life with humour and precision. A latter-day Jane Austen.
.The Rock Pool Cyril Connolly (OUP pp. 138, £2.50). Connolly's only novel, about English snobbery in the South of France in the Twenties, with a bonus — a long letter to Peter Quennell about the problems of writing and getting published. Rejected for 13 years as obscene but it's hard now to see why.
Scars Upon My Heart: Women's poetry of World War One selected by Catherine Reilly (Virago pp. 144, £3.75). Eighty poets including Vera Brittain who wrote 'Your battle wounds are scars upon my heart' to her brother four days before he died in 1918. The pain of lost lovers, brothers and sons and of nursing victims from the trenches.
Rough Justice: the extraordinary truth about Charles Richardson and his gang Robert Parker (Fontana pp. 352, £1.95). Richardson's letter to The Times last year while he was on the run explained justice as he saw it but this account of underworld torture and jet-set burglary show that he had bent reality a little.
The Hangover Handbook: The definitive guide to the causes and cures of mankind's oldest affliction David Outerbridge (Pan pp. 96, £1.25). An entertaining mixture of medical facts, old wives' tales and bizarre concoctions. No known cure but anti-hangover preparations do work.
Romanticism Hugh Honour (Pelican pp. 415, £5.95). Art between 1790 and 1850. It's hard to define this complex period in artistic terms so we start with the French Revolution. Spontaneity, individuality and inner truth is what they were after so artists were affected by political upheaval, as this scholarly work shows.
Crowds and Power Elias Canetti (Penguin pp. 575, £2.95). Speedily re-issued since Canetti won the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature. But it is more a political treatise, examining the behaviour of crowds and how leaders can manipulate them once they lose individual identity. Inflation and mass murder are first cousins, he says.
The Aristos John Fowles (Triad Granada pp.
20(, i1.50). He's a democratic socialist — but not a quasi-emotional liberal. Fowles was told that these random philosophical thoughts in support of the individual would do his image no good. Eloquent and unpredictable.
Acid Drops: How to get your own back with immortal sarcasm and elegant bitchery Kenneth
Williams (Coronet pp. 192, f1.25). 'From the moment 1 picked up your book until 1 put it down I was convulsed with laughter' Groucho Marx once said. 'Someday I intend to read it'. And so on.
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