Books of the Year
A selection of the best and most overrated books of the year, chosen by some of The Spectator's regular reviewers.
Robert Blake
My first choice is Alistair Home's Macmil- lan 1891-1956 (Macmillan, £16.95). It is the first of two volumes of the authorised biography of one of the strangest figures of our times. It is by no means flattering. Some reviewers have said it is not 'warts and all', but all warts. This is too severe a judgment about a book which has to steer a difficult line between admiration and real- ism. On the two key issues — Cossacks in 1945, Suez in 1956 — the author is candid, clear and unequivocal. Macmillan comes out well over the first, badly over the second.
Professor Fishman has written a bril- liantly perceptive study of the London poor a century ago — East End, 1888 (Duckworth, £18.95). I doubt whether his and my political views would coincide, or even overlap marginally. The success of the capitalist system in overcoming this fearful misery and poverty is not something he would enthusiastically acknowledge. But he has given us a marvellous and vivid account of the poverty-stricken world of the East End 100 years ago. The book is not only scholarly and well documented, it is also very easy to read.
My third choice is very different — Bertie (Lord) Denham's Fox Hunt (Mac- millan, £9.95). This thriller is not only compulsive reading, it tells the layman about foxhunting as vividly as Surtees, about point-to-points and how to cheat, and for good measure how to deal with affairs in the House of Lords where the author is Chief Whip. To cap it all, the villain is the 'wicked baronet' — a figure whom I had assumed to be extinct since the end of Queen Victoria's reign. And he really is very wicked indeed. The book is a splendid Christmas read for young and old — and peers.
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