Richard Ingrams
No doubt thanks to my part-time involve- ment in the affairs of the Wallingford Bookshop (Mrs M. Ingrams Prop.) I have read a great many more new books than usual this year. Those that I have enjoyed include T.H. White's Letters to a Friend because they reminded me what a good writer, and a brave and humorous man, White was. A Very Private Eye introduced another lonely and disappointed writer, Barbara Pym, who triumphantly rose above it all and who turned out to be not at all the sort of person one imagined from her novels. A.N. Wilson's Hilaire Belloc was the most readable biography for some time, the author managing with great skill and industry somehow to select all that was pointful from Belloc's diffuse and chaotic life and make a narrative out of it. A.J.P. Taylor's An Old Man's Diary gave a touching self-portrait of our best and only humble historian. For laughs, I commend The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole in which Sue Townsend miraculously main- tains the standard of the Secret Diary as well as giving an accurate and convincing picture of life in modern Britain. Evelyn Waugh's Collected Journalism was full of good things and John Bowen's macabre and gruesome thriller The McGuffin un- putdownable
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