Ian Hislop
This year I seem to have read only books that people were talking about last year. They have therefore lost their dinner-party value, but some of them are still quite good.
I hugely enjoyed William Boyd's Blue Afternoon (Penguin, £5.99) and thought Nigel Williams's East of Wimbledon (Faber, £14.99, £5.99) was the funniest novel I had read since his last one. Some Other Rain- bow by John McCarthy and Jill Morrell (Bantam, £14.99) was as moving as every- one said and John Carey's Intellectuals and the Masses (Faber, £6.99) made me wish I had attended more of his lectures when I was an undergraduate.
The biggest disappointment was The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso (Cape, £19.99). This retelling of Greek myth was widely praised but turned out to be incredibly dull — or certainly the 80 pages I ploughed through were.
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