CHRISTMAS BOOKS I
Books of the Year
A selection of the best and most overrated books of the year, chosen by some of The Spectator's regular contributors
Francis King
Best and worst biographies of the year are both Peter Ackroyd's Dickens (Sinclair- Stevenson, £19.95). When I was not mar- velling at the author's mastery of his subject, his intellectual energy and his brilliance of style, I was coming on some weirdly self-indulgent, over-inflated pas- sage which caused me to wonder why some frank friend or courageous agent or editor had not said to him: 'Look, this really will not do. Condense this or cut this.' Perhaps someone did say that, and he just refused to listen.
I also greatly enjoyed A Portrait of a Friendship edited by Alethea Hayter (Michael Russell, £16.95). Why this collec- tion of amusing, observant and perceptive letters written by the 19th-century Amer- ican poet James Russell Lowell to Sybella Lady Lyttelton has been hardly noticed is a mystery to me.
Most underrated novel of the year was Christoph Ransmayr's The Last World (Chatto, £12.95), a fine experimental work
in a lustrous translation from the German by John Wood.
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