Patrick Leigh Fermor
Best books: The Cretan Journal by Edward Lear. No need to know Crete to enjoy this well-produced and captivating diary. Lear's coloured and monochrome pictures of people and places adorn every other page and the whole book is steeped in his personality. An excellent Christmas pre- sent.
Albanian Assignment by David Smiley. Colonel Smiley, a regular in the Blues, was one of the two irregulars to slip into the wildest terrain in Europe as the spearhead of our wartime mission. Soldierly direct- ness heightens the drama of his extraordin- ary tale. Intrigues, battles, explosions and pursuits scatter the page, with only an occasional respite when Smiley, after blow- ing a score of bridges and covered with lice, settles down to a parachuted Horse and Hound in a quiet cave. An important book and the key to all that happened there since.
Very different from the Gymnasium of the Mind, where Roger Hinks's journal of a sensitive and omniscient art-historian alternates between profound and original meditation and the day-to-day comments, events and gossip of a shrewd and very amusing observer, and, incidentally, a close friend of Ivy Compton-Burnett, the subject of the ironically titled Secrets of a Woman's Heart, Hilary Spurling's brilliant biography sequel to Ivy When Young. The completion of her task prompts us to a complete rereading of the books, guided by clear and totally new insight.
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