CHRISTMAS BOOKS II
Books of the Year
A further selection of this year's best or most overrated books, chosen by some of The Spectator's regular contributors
Bryan Robertson
Apart from magisterial studies of Goethe, Picasso and Darwin, I was most touched by David Marr's biography of the novelist Patrick White (Cape, £20). I knew this courageous and abrasive writer and can Vouch for the accuracy of Marr's account of growing up in an affluent but non-artistic fatally context in the Australian country- side and London and Sydney in the Twenties and Thirties, as well as his focus on the powerful imaginative identity. Among novels, Milan Kundera's Immortah- 1Y (Faber, £14.99) entertained me most through its edgy wit, aphoristic double- takes on life, art and politics, and its attention-grabbing unpredictability. As a sharply etched memoir, Philip Roth's Patrimony (Cape, £13.99), about the death of his father, moved me very much because Of its truthfulness, as in his novels, both to life and to art.
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