Christopher Hawtree
My greatest enjoyment was the Disney Aladdin — I've watched the American video three times now. It is the studio's finest and in the voice of the genie, con- tains Robin Williams's best performance.
Francis Haskell's History and Its Images (Yale, £30), a book of the sort that English university presses should issue, will occupy me over the winter. In the meanwhile, I have enjoyed the final volume of Edmund Wilson's journals, The Sixties (Farrar Strau- us, $35): it is the finest instalment, and, scandalously, not to be published here, nor is a best-selling omnibus of the great Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel (Pan- theon, $27) — why do English review pages give so little idea of what is going on around the world? It has been an excellent year for anthologies, in particular the reve- lations of The Faber Book of Movie Verse edited by Philip French and Ken Machlin (£20) and The Penguin Book of Interviews (Viking, £18.95) edited by Christopher Sil- vester; familiar subjects are given a fresh perspective in A. N. Wilson's Faber Book of London (£17.50) and Dr Francis Wheen's Chatto Book of Cats (£15.99). Among nov- els, I enjoyed William Boyd's The Blue Afternoon (Sinclair-Stevenson, £14.95) and — too little noticed — Patrick McGrath's elegantly horrific Dr Haggard's Disease (Viking, £14.99, £8.99). Francis King's Yesterday Came Suddenly (Constable, £16.99) had me awake and hooting until one in the morning, while Kenneth Williams's Diaries (Harper, £20) are much funnier than some reviews implied, and surely the Philip Larkin on display in Andrew Motion's life (Faber, £20) was as much a tease as Nancy Mitford in her Letters (Hodder, £20). Richard Holmes's Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (Hodder, £20) is
admirably distilled, while the third volume of Katherine Mansfield's Letters (OUP, £35) and the final one of D. H. Lawrence's (CUP, £60) will provide much foraging. Douglas Chadwick's The Fate of the Ele- phant deserved far more notice (Viking, £16.99). There are many historical rediscoveries in the Pimlico series of paper- backs but, all in all, perhaps book of the year is Graham Greene's movie-writing, Mornings in the Dark (Carcanet, £29.95) almost everything that the marvellous The Pleasure-Dome should have been.
I seem to have chosen more books than last year, which will probably bring on a coronary in the various reviewers of review- ers, but it is heartening, if alarming, to think how much there is to read. With this in mind there is no need to waste time over Paul Theroux's Milroy the Magician (Hamish Hamilton, £15.99): it was praised in some quarters, but that combination of The Mosquito Coast and The F-Plan Diet did not have the potency of either work.
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