Ross Clark
Although the gross overproduction of biographies continued apace this year, I have to admit to enjoying Adrian Vaughan's new life of Brunel. Although not a great literary work, Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Engineering Knight Errant (John Murray, £19.95) promises to be the Satanic Verses of the railway buffs world. Why? Not because it claims the great engineer's mind was consumed as much by pettifoggery as by great thoughts, but because it dares to suggest that the broad gauge was a waste of time and moneY. Seldom is such an outrageous act commit- ted.
I enjoyed, too, Dr Anthony Daniels' account of travels in the Marxist back- waters of Albania, Romania, North Korea and Cuba — The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World (Hutchinson, £16.99). Daniels says he has 'long been fas- cinated by the passing of ways of life'. In this case it is the last gasps of communism to which he takes his stethoscope. Since he began the book in early 1989 his patient appears finally to have passed away. Daniels excels at telling the relatives.
I do not think Timothy Mo's The Redundancy of Courage (Chatto, £13.99) quite deserved to make the Booker Prize short list. He seems to have had a reserved place on the list ever since the publication of his excellent Sour Sweet in 1982. I found the voice of Sousa Jamba in Patriots (Viking, £13.99) more convincing in the telling of third world tales. I hope Jamba will now turn his pen to his adopted home, England.
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