Isabel Colegate
Books I have enjoyed this year have included Rebecca West by Victoria Glen- dinning (Weidenfeld, £14.95) — can there ever have been a more perspicacious yet kindly biographer of impossible women? — Letters of Conrad Russell 1897-1947, edited by Georgiana Blakiston (John Mur- ray, £16.95), interesting among other things as a view of life in the country in the second world war, but the trenchant com- ments of this fundamentally melancholy man may make you laugh aloud on almost any page, and The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul (Viking, £10.95), subtitled 'A Novel', but really a prolonged meditation on the condition of being a writer, given an odd additional interest by the fact that, though he does not say so, much of the book was clearly written in a cottage belonging to the Wilsford Manor estate, the sale of which attracted so much atten- tion recently. Naipaul's view from the periphery (he only glimpsed his eccentric landlord on two occasions) has a dreamlike quality hard to forget. May I be allowed an extra in the slim shape of C. H. Sisson's latest collection God Bless Karl Marx (Carcanet, £4.95)? Slim volumes from Sisson are worth fat ones from any other poet now living that I can think of at the moment. Overrated: Richard Ellman's Oscar Wilde (Hamish Hamilton, £15), too reverent, too exhaustive.
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