Wilfred De'Ath
The best book I have read this year, in the sense of the most edifying, is undoubtedly Cardinal Hume's To Be A Pilgrim. Great Princes of the Church are not, generally speaking, very strong spiritually, but the good Cardinal is a notable exception.
But to nail, once and for all, the lie that I am a male chauvinist, I nominate Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives, a feminist study of five Victorian marriages, those between Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, Effie Gray and John Ruskin, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens, and George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, as my book of the year. Miss Rose's thesis, that of a very moderate feminist, is that the much- derided Victorians may well have had a more flexible and tolerant view of marriage than 'liberated' post-Freudian man. The book is most convincingly argued and beautifully written.
The worst book I read this year was also written by a feminist, Mary Ingham. Men: The Male Myth Exposed was based on interviews with 96 incredibly boring men in an attempt to shed light on the terrible war that is currently being waged between men and women. Her interviewees were so dull that she only succeeded in muddying the waters even further. In feminist literature, as in everything else, it is good material and good writing that count.
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