A NDRO L INKLATER We have no Whig historians in this country
to match the stature of David McCullough, whose reputation in the United States is of Macaulayesque proportions. His Pulitzer Prize-winning 1776 (Penguin, £8.99) can be wholly recommended both for its story-telling of that climactic year and, no less forcefully, for its optimistic perception that change, however hard to achieve, is always for the best.
The recent death of Aleister Crowley’s biographer and executor, John Symonds, prompted me to look again both at his fantastical novels and quirky editing of the self-obsessed old fraud’s diaries. The surreal quality of his 1966 novel, With a View on the Palace, remains comic and wicked.
No living author gives me more pleasure than Kazuo Ishiguro and the pro found melancholy of Never Let Me Go (Faber, £7.99) seemed more remarkable even than The Remains of the Day something I had not thought possible.
Previous page
