Paul Johnson
John Davies' A History of Wales (Allen Lane/Penguin £30) is a learned, thorough, unvainglorious, sensitive and subtle book, originally written in Welsh. It contains everything the civilised Englishman needs and ought to know about the history of the Principality. I wonder if Prince Charles has read it yet?
A thoroughly good read is Tom Pocock's Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire (Weidenfeld, £20), an evocation of a splen- didly single-minded imperialist who was much more than just a gifted writer of adventure stories.
I also enjoyed, and learned much from, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonisa- tion and Cultural Change 950-1350 by Robert Bartlett (Allen Lane/Penguin
`Personally, I was very happy with the divorce settlement.' £22.50), a model work of academic history which might make our Euro-fanatics think again if they have the sense to read it. Among books I deplored in 1993 were Edward W. Said's Culture and Imperialism (Chatto, £20) which argues, among other things, that when Jane Austen wrote Mansfield Park she was really thinking about Antigua and the slave trade; and the Oxford Companion to Politics of the World (OUP, £30), a trendy-left, politically correct volume unworthy of a great publisher.
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