Noel Malcolm I am usually too busy reading old books
to manage very many new ones. None of my choices, therefore, is altogether new. The first is an obvious one: Geoffrey Hill's Collected Poems, newly assembled by Pen- guin. Some poets suffer badly from being collected — you begin to see what recipe they use when cooking up their poems. With Hill the collection has the opposite effect. My second choice is even less new: Richard Whately's Historic Doubts Rela- tive to Napoleon Buonaparte, first pub- lished in 1819 and now issued in an annotated (and rather expensive) edition by Scolar Press. The future archbishop was a young Oxford don when he wrote this pamphlet. Oslo don was ever less donnish', says the DNB, adding that he trained his spaniel to climb a tree and dive from it into the Cherwell.) It is a rhetorical tour-de-force (with a serious, half- concealed satirical purpose), showing how unlikely it is that Napoleon ever existed: the whole story is implausible, and all the evidence comes from hearsay, newspapers or interested parties. Finally, Edith Durham's High Albania (published in 1909 and now reprinted by Virago) is the perfect travel book, written by a resilient and wonderfully observant woman who was fascinated by everything she saw: amulets, corn-mills, marriage customs, madmen, tortoises, archbishops and, above all, in- numerable blood-feuds.
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