Edward Heathcoat Amory
Normally, I am a devotee of escapist litera- ture, but this was my year for books about the real world. Julian Barnes's new novel, England, England (Cape, £15.99), dissected our national identity, easily the most inter- esting political issue of the day. It was a brilliant, witty charabanc tour around our nation's cultural and psychological her- itage, and far more fun to read than end- less political pamphlets on the same theme. Away from our sceptered isle, I read a book about Africa which completely trans- formed my view of the dark continent. Thomas Pakenham's Scramble for Africa (Abacus, £12.99) revealed the origins of most of its present-day problems in the drawing-rooms of 19th-century Europe, as well as being a wild tale of guns and ivory. From the political to the personal, I had always liked Ted Hughes as a man, and admired him as an angler, while harbouring reservations about his poetry. BirthdaY Letters (Faber, £14.99) changed that. It was an extraordinary testament in limpid prose. Whichever People's Poet Mr Blair chooses to follow him has been set a hard standard. My disappointment of the year was Robert Harris's Archangel (Hutchinson, £16.99). I had hoped for an intelligent escape, as offered by his previous books, but this dark Russian fairy story never gripped, as the plot drifted from fiction to fantasy. The fact that the publisher of my hardback had reprinted 30 pages twice, missing out a chunk of the story, didn't help either.
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