Christopher Hawtree
A dozen best books spring readily to mind. Among them, Keith Walker's amusing, scholarly and superficially expensive edi- tion of Rochester's Poems shows that he is a more considerable figure than the rake of legend generally allows. But perhaps the book that afforded me most entertainment (and alarm) was Katherine Everard's 1950 A Star's Progress (Dutton), a highly comic novel which has remained obscure for so long that it might well count as new and, ergo, be given the re-issue it so richly deserves.
After I reviewed Amanda Hemingway's novel Tantalus in another journal, the author was quoted in an interview as wishing to tip molten chocolate over me. This unrealised threat notwithstanding, Tantalus remains the most preposterous and ill-written farrago to have come my way for several years. It might be closely followed by Robert McCrum's The Fabu- lous Englishman, a spy-story with preten- sions to something more, which was bog- ged down by the author's impression that all you need is to quote old pop-songs to give a sense of period. Ain't that a shame.
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