Mice Thomson
Every political novel this year seemed to feature MPs embracing oranges and the like with unnatural vigour, including Ian McEwan's Amsterdam (Cape, £14.99) and John Mortimer's Sound of Trumpets (Viking, £16.99). But none of them could match Westminster's bizarre reality, and so were curiously banal. Political history was a better bet; Amanda Foreman's biography of an 18th-century 'It Girl', Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (HarperCollins, £19.99), stood out. Further still away from Clapham Common, Memoirs of a Geisha (Vintage, £6.99) concentrated on the more elegant courtship rituals of mid-20th-centu- ry Japan, as Arthur Golden ingeniously blended fashion, food and sex.
For those who prefer their food unblend- ed, the best food books were written by restaurant critics, perhaps because, as Nigella Lawson says, there has been a revo- lution in eating, not cooking, restaurants, not dining-rooms. I recommend Australian reviewer Terry Durack's YUM (New Hol- land, £19.99), and Vogue food critic Jerry Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything (Headline, £14.99), including Korean pick- le and Indian puddings.
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