Harold Acton
Flora Fraser's Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma Hamilton (Weidenfeld and Nicol- son) has converted me to a character I used to dislike and filled me with admiration for her sympathetic biographer. Surely this is the last word on Nelson's flamboyant paramour.
For its enthusiastic evocation of a vanished Ruritania I revelled in Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Water and the Woods (John Murray), recounting a genial youth's travels on foot through pre-war Austro-Hungary. His goal was Constantin- ople: I hope he will reach it in another volume. John Dixon Hunt's Gardens and Groves: Italian Renaissance Gardens in the English Imagination 1600-1750 (Dent) appealed to me strongly from various angles. A sumptuous book based on exten- sive research of our former Grand Tour- ists. And Christopher Duggan's revised History of Sicily by M. I. Finley and Denis Mack Smith (Chatto and Windus) brings the intricate saga of that fascinating island up to date, from the pre-Christian tyrants to those of the modern Mafia.
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