Taki
Wow! What a year for books. Fayed: The Unauthorised Biography by Tom Bower (Macmillan, £18.99) gave me almost as much pleasure to read as I will experience if the old phoney Pharaoh ever gets his comeuppance. Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin by Alexandra Richie (HarperCollins, £29.99) was another. Richie does for Berlin what Boswell did for the good Dr Johnson. Stalingrad by Antho- ny Beevor (Viking, £25) is the greatest bat- tle book ever written. I am still having nightmares over it. Marilyn, Hitler and Me by Milton Schulman (Andre Deutsch, £18.99) had a soothing effect after all the Stalingrad butchery.
How We Squandered the Reich by Rein- hard Spitzy (Michael Russell, £19.95) is the undistorted insider's view from the Ger- man side. If only they had got to Hitler before he wrecked Germany and his mag- nificent army. The Tories by Alan Clark (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20) tells it like it was, and he sure knows how to tell it. Oh, if only they had let the lady alone.
I only read books that interest me, as all the above did, but if I had to choose one that was overrated it would be Woodrow Wyatt's diaries (Macmillan, £25). WW is no Alan Clark, but he is a name-dropper and self-aggrandiser par excellence.
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