Patrick Leigh Fermor
I Have Sind: Charles Napier in India by Priscilla Napier (Michael Russell, £16.95). Ever since hearing the peccavi pun, most of us have felt drawn to this extraordinary man; rightly, this fine book shows. The writer has much of her kinsman's dash, and nothing can surpass her skill in conveying all the intrigues, and the fierce tensions and havoc of her battle-scenes along the Indus. (If only he had been in command in Greece, as Byron hoped!) A bit further north, Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (John Murray, £19.95) unfolds the exciting cen- tury of covert Russian and British adv- ances, counter-moves, feints, grabs and catastrophes beyond the Himalayas. It is Kim's backcloth. Some of this terrain is overlapped, in more recent years, by Xan Fielding's One Man in his Time: The Life of Lieut. Cal. 'Billy' McLean (Macmillan, £17.99), which follows the Greenmantle career of this gifted, brave and complicated cavalry officer turned guerrilla in the high mountains of Ethiopia, Albania, the Far East, Central Asia, the Levant, the Gulf States and Yemen. In The Quest for El Cid (Hutchinson, £18.95) Richard Fletcher dis- entangles with high style and scholarly Punctilio the legends and history that swathe this ambiguous hero. All diaries are addictive; Frances Partridge's, thanks to her dramatis personae, her gifts and her cast of mind, doubly so; and as Hanging On (Collins, £15) only covers 1960-63, there are many treats ahead. In The Estate (Macmillan, £19.95), the Duchess of De- vonshire carries us helter-skelter through innumerable acres, fells and woods, into byres, auction-tents and timber-yards, up into lofts and down drains. It is full of deep rustic addiction, comedy and barnyard lore, with no dearth of tupping and dren- ching. A week ago I knew nothing of orf, scrapie, swayback, blackleg, rattle-belly, pine, scad or scald but I'm older and wiser now. Finally, here comes Noel Annan's remarkable Our Age (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20) to soar in mid-sky.
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