Charles Glass
My wife, Fiona, who is a more voracious reader than I am, asked me to read Brian Inglis's The Unknown Guest: The Mystery of Intuition (Chatto & Windus, £12.95), which I hope to do soon. Inglis explores the notion of inspiration, which may help some of us to understand why the Muse sometimes fails us. Most of my reading this year has been of books which are not only old, but out of print, which is useless except for those of you who still keep public lending libraries alive. Fiona has galloped through Trollope, who is happily still in print in Oxford University Press paperback editions. The few new books I can recommend have invariably been by friends, who have kindly sent them to me. So, beware my judgment, which is pre- judiced with affection. Two of these novels are sadly available only in American edi- tions: Philip Caputo's excellent Indian Country (Bantam, $18.95) and Kati Mar- ton's An American Woman (Norton, $15.95). An American novel which was published here this year is Philip Roth's delightful The Counterhfe (Cape, £10.95). Roth tells the same tale of sex, love and escape in several versions, each recasting making it a new story. One English friend, L. M. Shakespeare, has just published a thriller, Utmost Good Faith (Macdonald, £10.95), set in the morally dubious world of Lloyd's and those who would defraud it. Moving from fiction to politics, read any- thing by two of the few Americans to stand up to and above the idiocy of American political thought in the twilight of Reagan- ism, Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal. Finally, from my good friend James Michie, there is his translation of The Odes of Horace (The Folio Society, £17.95). With the Latin verse and English transla- tion on facing pages, this new edition is a valiant and beautiful attempt to keep this poet alive for a generation which is lament- ably losing its classical heritage, wilfully abandoning Latin for business studies and morality for money-making. St Jerome, preserve us.
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