Patrick Skate Catling
Wolf Mankowitz's valediction (he says it's his last book) is that rarity, an entertaining novel of ideas. A Night with Casanova (Sinclair-Stevenson, £13.95) is a thought- fully witty appraisal of the relative disadvantages of mortality and immortality, discussed by Casanova in his dotage and the Wandering Jew in his accursed, ever- lasting vigour. My favourite travel book of the year was Three Letters from the Andes (Murray, £10.95), by the elegantly erudite and amusing Patrick Leigh Fermor. I had long been curious about the relics of the Inca and Spanish civilisations of the high Andes of Peru. Now I don't have to go there. Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilisation by John Lahr (Blooms' bury, £14.99) is the most enjoyable book I've ever read on the motives, moods and methods of a comic genius. Lahr spent a month backstage with the Australian surrealist transvestite Barry Humphries and sympathetically tells almost all. As fOr the past year's debit side: there were two outstsandingly nasty American works of anti-Americanism. Norman Mailer's long-ballyhooed CIA novel, Harlot's Ghost (Michael Joseph, £15.99) proved to be flatulent. P.J. O'Rourke's facetiously misanthropic dissection of the US government, Parliament of Whores (Picador, £14.99), is much shorter but didn't seem to be.
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