CHRISTMAS BOOKS II

Books of the Year

A further selection of the best and most overrated books of the year, chosen by some of The Spectator's regular contributors

Theodore Dalrymple

Perhaps it is because I am growing older that I find death and its accoutrements so fascinating. It is also one of the reasons I am drawn to Hispanic culture, which is very good at death. From Madrid to Purgatory by Carlos M. N. Eire (CUP, £40) is a fascinat- ing account of Spanish funerary practices during the 16th century. The death of Philip II is described in unforgettable detail. Reading this book gave me the kind of melancholy pleasure that walking round a good graveyard does. A taste for walking in graveyards is surprisingly common.

The Cult at the End of the World by David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall (Hutchin- son, £16.99) is a journalistic account of the cult of Aum in Japan which released poisoned gas on the underground railway in Tokyo. That intelligent and technically accomplished people should have joined this absurd cult is a dreadful warning of the dangers of narrowness of mind and educa- tion.

So many bad books, subsequently over- praised, are published that it would be invidious to select one.

Philip Glazebrook

Having always rather wondered about the man, I found in A Life of Matthew Arnold by Nicholas Murray (Hodder, £20) all the material needed about Arnold and his con- temporaries to give the picture balance and depth. Arnold was a poet (in one poem, `Thyrsis', a great poet) subdued into an essayist by drudging his life away in the engine-room of Victorian intellectual Britain.

It was possible in Arnold's day, as it is not in ours, to be 100 per cent British without being provincial. The interest of Out of Egypt by Andre Aciman (Harvill, £15.99) is that it creates page by page and portrait by portrait a cosmopolitan atmosphere in chunks of such convincing density (the Levant of a family of Jewish traders) that Aciman makes you see even Surrey from an Alexandrian point of view.

Longitude by Dava Sobell (Fourth Estate, £12) is an essay emotionalising a scientific conundrum — the means of cal- culating longitude — which, starting with the murder of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, milks for drama every character and every action in the story.

James Lees-Milne

Paul Johnson's Quest for God (Weidenfeld, £14.99), dogmatic and provocative though it be, is a must for all who acknowledge, and even those who reject, the Christian faith in the West.

Peter Levi's Eden Renewed: The Public and Private Life of John Milton (Macmillan, £20) is a scholar's biography. Levi's mas- tery of classical and scriptural learning is a match for the esoteric allusions which teem in Milton's verse. The author's narrative of the poet's everyday life, hitherto barely known, is extremely lively.

I found Jessica Douglas-Home's The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse (Harvill, £20) enthralling. An inspired play- er of harpsichord and clavicord, amounting to genius, Violet held in thrall under one roof four highly civilised men who adored her and yet were devoted to one another. Tiny, earnest, frail and dressed exotically, she was a tiger of self-centredness who pur- sued a voracious passion for Renaissance and baroque music, old houses and eccen- tric fine arts.

Bevis Hillier

One assured classic this year is Jonathan Raban's Bad Land (Picador, £15.99) — for- ays into the state of Montana by the English writer who now lives in Seattle. The terrain is superficially unprepossess- ing, but Raban's empathy with the people, phenomenal descriptive powers and writhingly funny bursts of irony make this a masterwork of travel-writing.

Empathy is also the prime quality of Colm Toibin's The Story of the Night (Picador, £15.99). The way Thibin, an Irish- man, gets inside the skin of a quite different character— an Argentinian work- ing for the CIA — is a literary conjuring trick not equalled since Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince (1973). Graham Greene would have had the CIA betray the hero; Toibin's ending has a less predictable twist.

The story of how Horace Walpole pur- sued the handsome Lord Lincoln across Europe is told with such farcical panache in Timothy Mowl's Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider (John Murray, £19.99) that it should be turned into a comic operetta. Myfanwy Piper should write the libretto, Richard Rodney-Bennett the music.

Andrew Barrow

My two favourites are Beryl Bainbridge's Every Man for Himself (Duckworth, £14.99), a story of incredible strength and tenderness, and Hugh Massingberd's sec- ond selection of Daily Telegraph obits, Heroes and Adventurers (Macmillan, £15.99), a witty and life-enhancing record of bristling brigadiers and other brave, bold characters who died during the author's glorious reign as Britain's leading obituar- ist.

A far more peculiar book, which also dis- plays restrained strength and subtle tender- ness, is Hugo Vickers' The Kiss (Hamish Hamilton, £15). This exquisitely deadpan account of a remarkably deadbeat family combines a Caroline Blackwoodish emo- tional force with a Terry Major-Ballish attention to detail. It is Vickers' master- piece to date and a surprising new depar- ture for the chronicler of Beaton, Garbo, Vivien Leigh etc.

For sheer effervescence and an effort- less, harmless read on a cold, dark night, I would recommend Cristina Odone's The Shrine (Phoenix, £5.99), a heart-warming romp set in a small Italian town.

Raymond Carr

Political biography is one of the finest achievements of British letters. The appearance of David Gilmour's Curzon in paperback (Papermac, £13) allows me to pay belated tribute to a fine example of the genre. Gilmour reveals the greatness and shortcomings of this giant of a man. A. J. P. Taylor is exposed as a historian with no concern for the truth and I was delighted to learn that Curzon — rightly— regarded the introduction of after-dinner bridge as spelling the death of civilised social inter- course.

Among the recently bulky two-kilo books on European history John Roberts' A His- tory of Europe (Helicon, £25) is distin- guished by its author's admirable gift for the compression of complex issues. Always illuminating and sound in its judgments, it can be read in bed.

William A. Christian's Visionaries (Uni- versity of California Press, $35) is a moving and scholarly acccount of the attempt to promote a Spanish rival to Lourdes. Unlike at Lourdes, the peasant visionaries were condemned as frauds by the Catholic hierarchy. After enjoying a brief hour of fame in a publicity campaign orchestrated by enthusiastic believers, those who had professed to see the Virgin Mary and a variety of saints came to a pathetic end.

Sheridan Morley

A great year for diaries and theatre novels. Of the former, Christopher Isherwood, Diaries, Volume I, edited by Katherine Bucknell (Methuen, £25) for first-class literary gossip, Ned Sherrin's Sherrin's Year (Virgin, £16.99) for first nights and foot- lights in the Agate tradition of Egos 1 to 9 and Sir Alec Guinness's My Name Escapes Me (Viking, £18) for a lesson in how to describe the minute detail of a year in which nothing at all happened to him, while simultaneously disappearing into the pages of his own text, a vanishing trick hitherto only perfected by Sir Dirk Bogarde in his memoirs.

Good theatre novels from Clare Colvin (A Fatal Season, Duckworth, £14.99), Eleanor Bron (Double Take, Weidenfeld, £15.99) and (again) Ned Sherrin (Scratch an Actor, Sinclair-Stevenson, £15.99), who achieves some sort of record by having five books in the stores for Christmas. For real backstage drama, better to try Claire Bloom's Leaving a Doll's House (Virago, £16.99) — catastrophic affairs and/or marriages with Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Rod Steiger, Hillard Elkins and Philip Roth — or Sarah Miles' mesmerical- ly dotty account of affairs with (again) Olivier and just about anybody else worthy of index entry, Bolt from the Blue (Orion, £18.99).

Earlier in the year, a wonderful first novel from Barry Humphries (Women in the Background, Heinemann, £14.99, Man- darin, £5.99), also highly theatrical; Michael Billington's brilliantly definitive biography of Harold Pinter (The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, Faber, £20); a superb collection of Broadway essays from John Lahr (Light Fantastic: Adventures in Theatre, Bloomsbury, £20) and Peter O'Toole's second volume of memoirs, Loitering with Intent: The Apprentice, (Macmillan, £20), even better than his first.

Among the dregs, dire biographies of Hugh Grant, J. Arthur Rank and Laurence Olivier — this last (The Real Life of Laurence Olivier, Century, £17.99) memo- rable for containing several more thousand words about its author, Roger Lewis, than his admittedly over-familiar subject. Maybe I can open my theatre bookshop at last.

Noel Annan

Geniuses rarely lead exemplary lives — Chekhov is an exception. Virginia Woolf was malicious, mischief-making and untrustworthy; but not only does Hermione Lee (in Virginia Woolf, Chatto, £25) show how her books come out of her life but she makes these failings irrelevant beside her scintillating imagination, her power over words and her sense of fun.

Similarly Julie Kavanagh (in Secret Muses, Faber, £25) shows how Frederick Ashton flounced from lover to lover and was stingy and jealous; but what vitality, invention, discipline and what enchanting gaiety! Out of their suffering came that ferocious dedication to their art. Despite The Spectator reviewer's hatred of Woolf and the dismay of Ashton's friends that Julie Kavanagh tells all, to read these books makes you realise what it is to be a genius.

On another plane, The State Under Stress by Christopher Foster and Francis Plowden (Open University Press, £16.99) explains why ministers make so many cock-ups and why the civil service is being undermined by party think-tanks that make policy on the trot.

Paul Johnson

The publishing event of the year was unquestionably the appearance of Macmillan's 34-volume Dictionary of Art (£5,750). I have been browsing delightedly in it for weeks and it is clearly going to be the greatest resource and pleasure of my old age. The chief of its many merits is its revolutionary conservatism.

Shocking and astonishing almost beyond belief is Violet: The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse (Harvill, £20). The story of how this gifted harpsichordist and femme fatale ran a successful harem of four men is brilliantly told by her equally fasci- nating great-niece, Jessica Douglas-Home.

I also enjoyed The English Arcadia: Country Life 1897-1997 (Boxtree, £20) in which Sir Roy Strong records eloquently the first century of my second-favourite magazine. The most overrated book of the year, though not without merits, is of course the second volume of John Richard- son's hagiographic Life of Picasso, 1907-17 (Cape, £30) which has been universally boosted by the multi-million-dollar Picasso industry.

Duncan Fallowell

There have been quite a few Romanov coffee-table wallows in recent years but St Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars (Abbeville, £72) is unbeatable for sheer gorgeousness: page after page of domed, pillared and chandeliered wish-fulfilment in pulsating colour. The photographer Alexander Orlov has made brilliant use of the city's waterways and threatening skies. Dmitri Shvidkovsky's text is short and for the general reader, but not down-market. This ne plus ultra of St Petersburg picture- books, featuring all the star turns, now leaves the way open for more detailed studies of the subject, incorporating the countless less famous but scarcely less superb buildings which constitute the imperial capital.

There are insufficient books around of what one might call high-performance eccentricity, but Justin Wintle's Furious Interiors: Wales, R. S. Thomas and God (HarperCollins, £20) is one of culture (Wintle) and provincial culture (Thomas), but the encounter throws a vivid and unexpected light on many aspects of our contemporary world.

Bruce Anderson

John Ehrman has now concluded his life of the Younger Pitt. In its prose style, narra- tive and judgments, Vol III, The Consum- ing Struggle (Constable, £30), maintains the exalted standards of its predecessors. This is one of the finest biographies of the cen- tury.

Clare Colvin's first novel, A Fatal Season (Duckworth, £14.99), displays the same ele- gant craftsmanship as her short stories. She is an interesting new talent.

Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle per- formed a public service with their The Blair Revolution (Faber, £7.99). The banality of the style aptly matches the poverty of the contents. It should be required reading for anyone who still believes that new Labour stands for anything more than a new hairstyle. But it was not the worst political book of the year. That laurel must go to Stephen Haseler for The English Tribe: Identity Crisis in the New Europe (Macmil- lan, £40), a catalogue of errors and resent- ments.

Jennifer Paterson

Andrew Barrow's The Man in the Moon (Macmillan, £14.99). Another splendidly surreal book from Mr Barrow's pen; I loved it and its occupants, not least the author himself trying to be a stand-up comic against dreadful odds. Beautifully written, with a splendid eye for the incon- sequential detail. Beryl Bainbridge's Every Man for Himself (Duckworth, £14.99). This wonderful book is further proof that Miss Bainbridge is some sort of celestial being — or a witch, perhaps. She grabs you by the neck and hurls you into the freezing Atlantic with the shipmates, and sinks you with the unlucky ones. Even the prologue gives you the shivers. I don't know how she does it. A tiny little woman with a fierce and great talent. A Gentleman Publisher's Commonplace Book, edited by John G. Murray (John Murray, £9.95), A very charming, funny and wise collection of proverbs, illustrations and notes made and collected by the legendary Jock Murray and edited by his son. An ideal Christmas present for yourself and others. A Watch in the Night by A. N. Wilson (Sinclair-Steven- son, £15.99). I have thoroughly enjoyed all these books and this finale has provided the terrible answers to all the curious plot- tings. A. N.'s writing just makes me roar with laughter as well as educating me by its simple, beautiful ability.

And, of course, Two Fat Ladies (Ebury, £17.99). Quite the best cookbook of the year. Buy it!

John Fowles

I have no doubt which novel gave me most satisfaction this year. It was Peter Everett's Matisse's War (Cape, £15.99). It is that very rare thing, a case of English fiction that seems imbued with a deep understanding of France, this time, especially of the dying Matisse and of Aragon and his Russian companion, Elsa Triolet, indeed of many of the famous figures of that dark, though star-studded period. I haven't made such a satisfyingly evocative journey since Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot. I'd also like to mention the work of two poetesses I admire. One is the vivacious young Carol Ann Duffy, with whom I appeared at a recent British Council conference in Vien- na. Sadly, the other is the recently dead Zofia Ilinska. She remains as quirkily fresh and moving as one of her long-lost Polish meadows — or those Cornish shores where she ended.

Simon Blow

I've read only novels this year, apart from two Michelin guides, and I've decided its good to see novels with homosexual not `gay'— themes at last coming freely out of the publishing closet. No more of having to find a 'gay' publishing imprint. So I much enjoyed Neil Bartlett's Mr Clive and Mr Page (Serpent's Tail, £9.99). This enig- matic and disturbing account of a rich young man's ultimate fate as told by his not in any way rich rival (he works in Self- ridge's) has plenty to say about the sepa- rate worlds and the obsessive secrecy forced on those who indulged the forbid- den act in far off-days.

Wealth-aware, but not class-conscious, is Colm Tofbin's The Story of the Night (Picador, £15.99). Set in Buenos Aires around the time of the Falklands War, this novel is more importantly about an Argen- tine-domiciled English boy facing his sexu- ality in a country where a bourgeois spirit reigns. The naturalness of his homo- sexuality stresses impoverished small- mindedness. The arrival of Aids heightens the drama. Masterfully handled — and not in the least uncomfortably 'gay' — Tobin speaks for gentleness and candour, making his novel a revealing read for all who still hold prejudices or those who do not.

I like sea journeys where a forced intima- cy puts people's lives under a microscope. And what better occasion for this than when there is also an impending disaster? Beryl Bainbridge's Every Man for Himself (Duckworth, £14.99) is a tour de force. Bainbridge's projection of the idle rich aboard the doomed Titanic is made doubly compelling because, though they really have nothing to live for, yet mostly they do live — that is, the women and children. It was chiefly the upper classes that were saved. In 1912 class divisions were as strict in death as in life. It's fumbling a rosary for those below decks and a lifeboat for those above. But Beryl Bainbridge's skill lies in that it is so subtly and unobtrusively done. She gets brilliantly under the skin of a class quite different from her own.

Alastair Forbes

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne; The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain; The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope; Cap- tains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling; A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett; What Katy Did, What Katy Did Next, What Katy Did at School, by Susan Coolidge; Polyanna by Eleanor H. Porter (Wordsworth Edition, £1 each). Letter on Happiness by Epicurus (Gift Pocket Edi- tion, £4.50).

Fortified by The Spectator's recent publi- cation of Taki's endorsement of me as `good news for all children', I have been re- reading some of the works from my own and my seven sisters' libraries that I found had not lost their differing magics of long ago. I list some of them above. I re-read Tristram Shandy rather often, finding it a work of quite special genius.

Craig Brown

I would hate to be too cravenly Spectatorish in choosing a novel that is 134 years old, but Wilkie Collins' No Name (Penguin, £2.99) really was the best book I read this year. By turns witty, gripping, ingenious and creepy, it beats The Woman in White hands down. My favourite new books — or at least new in paperback — were Nick Hornby's enviable High Fidelity (Indigo, £5.99), which manages to hit a male nail bang on the head on every single page, and Eric Lomax's deeply moving autobiogra- phy, The Railway Man (Vintage, £6.99), the story of the tortured and his torturer, and the redemption from their different mis- eries they both find when they meet 40 years later. Tony Parker's The People of Providence has just been reissued by Eland Books (0.99). On the face of it, it couldn't sound more boring — oral transcripts of the residents of a South London housing estate — but in 20 years of reviewing it is the book that has lodged deepest in my mind. People talk about their lives, their hopes and their fears, and what emerges is a hymn to the diversity of humanity, and to the extraordinary reserves of courage with- in people normally overlooked or derided. Tony Parker died this year. He was a pecu- liarly self-effacing writer and his books all bore his hallmarks of integrity, curiosity and — unfashionable word in these circles — compassion.

John Grigg

Among historians of the first world war two Australians, Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior, are unsurpassed. Their latest jointly written work, Passchendaele: The Untold Story (Yale, £19.95), gives the clearest and most balanced picture yet of a battle whose very name evokes the horror and supposed futility of that war. The book is not unduly long and, despite the agonising subject, easy to read. The authors' even-handedness is manifest in the fact that they treat Haig and Lloyd George with almost equal sever- ity. Above all, their explanation of techni- cal developments helps us to understand how in the following year — when essential tactical lessons had at last been learnt the British army was able to win the great- est victory in its history. (This will be the subject of their next book).

In a different genre, The Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme by Malcolm Brown (Sidgwick & Jackson, £20) is anoth- er valuable addition to first world war liter- ature. Drawing on contemporary letters, Brown shows us the Somme battle through the eyes of the participants. The exception- al quality of the material, together with the skill of Brown's linking narrative and com- mentary, make the book remarkably effec- tive.

In Red Saint, Pink Daughter (Deutsch, £17.99), Silvia Rodgers gives a fiercely elo- quent account of life in Berlin under the Nazis — as the child of Jewish parents who were also Polish and communist — and of her early experiences as a refugee in Eng- land. No book has impressed me more this year.

Mary Killen

During a harrowing year of toddler- minding I derived some escapist relief from Julia Hamilton's A Pillar of Society (Penguin, £5.99), a novel peopled by char- acters a reader could actually 'fancy', and yet an uplifting one, since good triumphs over evil. Another lower-upper-middle- brow read was Hugo Vickers' The Kiss (Hamish Hamilton, £15). I read it with mounting fondness for the author who is unabashed about his lifelong interest in OAPs. In this true account of one of the earliest instances of stalking (among indi- gent gentlefolk) Vickers bears out the dic- tum that the truth is far far funnier than fiction. Andrew Barrow's second novel, The Man in the Moon (Macmillan, £14.99), demonstrated once more his talent for drawing hilarity out of the singularly unfunny.