Sheridan Morley
In a good year for biographies, Scott Berg's Lindbergh (Macmillan, £25) flies solo above the best; Berg is effectively writing the his- tory of 20th-century America through a series of its major lives, and this one is easi- ly as good as his Goldwyn and Max Perkins. And while we are on the subject of Gold- wyn, The Penguin History of Hollywood is a marathon anthology (ed. Christopher Sil- vester, £25) which will tell you all you ever needed to know about an industry and a way of life that were born with this century and have died with it; the Emerald City of Oz is no longer on any map.
Christopher Matthew's A Nightingale Sang in Femhurst (John Murray, £12.99) is a little gem from the country's most under- rated humorist; ostensibly a 'schoolboy journal of 1945', it too captures a lost way of life, in this case that of a suburban English boy.
I have always rather liked the idea that journalists come below estate agents in popularity polls, but one book this year stands out above the rest; it is, I believe, the bravest and best book I have read by a journalist, the only one that has ever made me proud of my profession and ashamed of every setback I have ever complained to anyone about in my entire career. It is, of course, the memoirs of John Diamond and his ongoing fight for his own life (C: Because Cowards get Cancer Too, Vermil- ion, £9.99). Gift book of the year has to be Nicholas and Alexandra, edited by Mark Sutcliffe (Booth-Clibborn Editions, £45), the final chapter of Tsarist Russia and breathtaking in its riches.
Most overrated book of the year is undoubtedly the Woodrow Wyatt diaries (Macmillan, £25). Not only was the man what Alan Clark's wife would have called an S-H-one-T (that seems to go with the job), but an appalling writer, who could more usefully just have compiled a tele- phone directory for the socially inadequate. Bring back Chips Channon and Harold Nicolson, or, come to that, even Alan Clark himself.
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