Digby Durrant
Fathers and Sons by Alexander Waugh (Headline, £8.99) about his extraordinary forebears starting with the Brute, his greatgreat-grandfather, who always carried a whip with an ivory handle with which he crushed a wasp on his wife's cheek. His son Arthur was totally unlike his father, though siring a son, Evelyn, who was not entirely dissimilar, and whom he published, sometimes overruling his Board to do so. The author's father, Auberon, described by Polly Toynbee as 'effete, drunken, snobby, sneering, racist and sexist', was to Alexander 'a loyal, generous father ... I am honoured to be his pale shadow'.
James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, (Picador, £7.99). A doomed love between a Yale dropout and a French waitress and the irresistible car, the Delage, to drive them to those haunting small French hotels for the once-in-a-lifetime kind of love that's always too hot to cool down. Bliss!
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