Patrick Leigh Fermor
It didn't matter that, in spite of a second reading, the denouement of Bruce Chatwin's Utz (Cape, £9.95) is still an enigma: the vigour of the writing, the images, the sinister Prague atmosphere, carried me, golem-haunted and police- dogged through all the obsessive shadows. With Peter Quennell's Pursuit of Happi- ness (Constable, £12.95), colours and light changed to the hedonism of an eclectically- stocked library, picture-gallery and plea- sure garden where it was a delight to be led. As I had never read any of its predecessors, the infectious brio of Peter Levi's Life and Times of William Shakespeare (Macmillan, £16.95) was absorbing, and every page sent one back to the poems and the plays. Prospero's island came next, viz Edward Lear's The Corfu Years (Denise Harvey & Co, £40) where his captivating journals and letters and hundreds of beautifully reproduced pic- tures are splendidly edited and introduced by Philip Sherrard. Lastly, I enormously enjoyed Dmitri Obolensky's Six Byzantine Portraits (Clarendon Press, £27.50). It was a penetrating journey into the Greek and Slav worlds in the early days of the spread of the new faith in the Balkans and the Russias: twilight regions of clashing beliefs and loyalties, Bulgarian archbishops, Ser- bian saints, Byzantine emperors and Princes of Kiev — the whole area, in fact, which Obolensky has made his own.
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