Anthony Blond
I liked the certain way in which Isabel Colegate in her twelfth novel, Summer of a Royal Visit (Hamish Hamilton, £14.95), picks you up and puts you down in the sleazy end of Victorian Bath. Her delivery of shock is quite as expert as E.M. Forster's and I delighted in the irony of the scene when the Bishop interrupts his eulogy of the clergyman, who has died trying to save the lives of three children of the poor, to excoriate the many smelly from their ranks, who have dared to follow their hero's coffin into the Abbey.
David Starkie, a lovely cheeky chappie on radio, has written a study of politics, The Reign of Henry VIII (Collins & Brown, £9.50), which shows how like Whitehall was to the White House and that Kissinger is a sort of descendant from the Groom of the Stool who wiped the royal bum in return for power and perquisites.
Edmund White has made the boy- growing-up-queer novel a hard act to follow, but Alec Moran has a go in A Matter of Life and Sex (Paperdrum, £15.95) and tells, for me, the funny story of the year about the police station in Vine Street which he thought only existed on the Monopoly board.
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