Kay Dick
Non-fiction best: honours equally divided between Hilary Spurling's Secrets of a Woman's Heart and T. S. Eliot by Peter Ackroyd. Dame Ivy told me that if she was ever to write an autobiography (`I'm not thinking of doing it') it would be very interesting. In effect, Hilary Spurling has done it for her, with wit, elegance, im- mense shrewdness and perception. A vivid dramatic masterpiece, totally enthralling. No secret of this genius writer and iconclas- tic woman remains uncovered. When one considers that Peter Ackroyd was not allowed to quote from any of the Eliot papers, his achievement is all the more remarkable. His fine intelligence and lucid imagination give us a full portrait that can hardly be matched.
Fiction best: Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes. Quite wonderful because here is a novel designed by a dissident novelist in his refusal to conform. He sparkles and specu- lates about life, death, love, morality, sex, writing and a hundred matters with hardly any fiction obscuring his viewpoint. There is a fictitious narrator, but really he is awfully marginal. A mention must be made of Martin Amis's brilliant Money, serious and funny satire about the dangers of the world of goodies-material.
Worst books: without doubt Una Troub- ridge: Friend of Radclyffe Hall by Richard Ormerod, as grotesque and ghastly as the subject matter. The worst novel? Clearly one has not read it, but I'd guess that, had I done so, it would be Erica Jong's Para- chutes and Kisses, another chapter of semi- literate, pretentious rubbish for the sex- starved. A real pain in the mind. One has only to listen to this American lady ex- plaining her craft on radio to appreciate how mentally crippled her readers must be.
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