Jonathan Keates
The book which made the biggest impres- sion on me this year was in fact a free, one- off magazine produced by the Italian clothing company Benetton, devoted to the theme of friendships across the apparently unbridgeable chasm between Israelis and Palestinians — the commercial stunt as moving human document. Books qua books have impressed me less, but three stand out. Helen Langdon's Caravaggio (Chatto, £25) is a landmark in art-historical biography, accessible without vulgarity and radiant with understanding of the painter's moods and contexts. Christopher Ryan's The Poetry of Michelangelo (Athlone Press, £45), mixing invincible scholarship with fer- vour and simplicity, drew me back to one of the greatest Renaissance sonneteers (who just happened to adorn the Sistine Chapel). I eat anthologies for breakfast, and Penguin's Generations (£14.99), a cleverly angled collection of poems by par- ents and children about each other, edited by Melanie Hart and James Loader, is easily this year's most toothsome.
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