Nigel Spivey
It is with a sense of revenge placated that I have been reading Louis-Jean Calvet's Roland Barthes: A Biography (Polity, £29.50). What, Roland, of la mode de l'auteur? You who sought to scrub the writ- er into oblivion are more 'alive' than ever: whole sections of bookshops entitled ROLAND BARTHES, all your oeuvres in print, and now — to seal you up properly for posterity, the biography. Plus ca change.
Another biography, made great by its subject, William Morris by Fiona Mac- Carthy, is rightly subtitled 'A Life for Our Time' (Faber, £25). If Morris were alive today, he would not only be writing (terri- ble) Nordic sagas about foul Microchip Empires, but leading us with sledge- hammers against the foe. He deserved the weight of this book: too many people think of him simply as the progenitor of the Liberty print.
Best of the year: Geoff Dyer's The Miss- ing of the Somme (Hamish Hamilton, £15.99). This articulates a response to the Great War which many feel, but no one has analysed so scrupulously.
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