Gabriele Annan
The new writing I enjoyed most was the first chapter of Michael Ignatieff's The Russian Album (Chatto, £12.95) where he explains his compulsion to write a memoir of his grandparents who belonged to the Tsarist ruling class. I greatly admired The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (Weidenfeld, £15.95), the ele- giac third volume of E. J. Hobsbawm's history of the 19th century. It opens with an account of his parents meeting in 1913 (they were the same generation as Igna- tieff's grandparents) at the Sporting Club in Alexandria. Cavafy might have heard the click of their croquet mallets. Hobs- bawm's mother was a well-educated daughter of the Vienna Jewish bourgeoisie; his father was good at games and came from a poor, not much educated Jewish family of Russian-Polish immig- rants in the North of England. Hobsbawm writes of 'a twilight zone between history and memory; between the past as a gener- alised record. . . and the past as a remem- bered part of, or background to, one's own life'. I like books from this zone.
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