Christopher Hawtree
After packing 9,000 of them into tea- chests, I felt as though I never wanted to see a book again. The addiction soon returns. Christopher Hope's The Hottentot Room (Heinemann), a novel as effective and comic as The Human Factor for its depiction of a reluctant spy whose roots are in South Africa, had a curiously dull reception. As did John Bowen's The Girls, (Hamish Hamilton). There can be no better way of spending Christmas than in reading Vikram Seth's sharp but not un- sympathetic novel of middle-class Califor- nians, The Golden Gate (Faber) (if I can find my copy I shall do so for a third time). Protracted nostalgia has found me delight- ing in John Wilford's The Riddle of the Dinosaur (Faber), The Railway Station (OUP) by Jeffrey Richards and John Mackenzie, Pavilions on the Sea (Hale) — a history of the pier by Cyril Bainbridge Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp's Follies, the new edition of Redcliffe Sala- man's magisterial, 700-page History and Social Influence of the Potato and J. N. D. Kelly's The Oxford Dictionary of Popes.
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