John Jolliffe
I greatly admired John Simpson's In the Forests of the Night (Hutchinson, £16.99), a
hair-raising first-hand exposé of the ultra-
murderous Shining Path movement, and the almost equally criminal control of drug production by the Peruvian Army. How these activities might be halted is sadly another matter. In a different genre, Isaiah Berlin's Magus of the North (John Murray, £14.99) is a stimulating account of a philosopher, Hamann by name, who nobody else has ever heard of, but who now comes into his own. If such a book had been available at Oxford, instead of the interminable linguistic algebra served up by the plodding followers of the extraordinari- ly conceited A. J. Ayer, Greats in the 1950s would have been a joy instead of (to an unfortunate extent) a dull pain.
An older book I had never read is Osbert Lancaster's Classical Landscape with Fig- ures (John Murray, 1947, out of print). The style, which is a blend of Gibbon and P. G. Wodehouse is occasionally a little strained, but the author affectionately explains how the Greeks have never made much distinc- tion between politics and charades, so that it comes as less of a surprise that they have re-elected the nauseating and disastrous Papandreou.
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